CRAFT - Chemical Reactivity and Fate Tool

CRAFT is a software suite that has been designed to assist scientists in the area of product safety, hazard and risk assessment and toxicology to interactively evaluate the chemical reactivity, persistence, biodegradation and fate of chemical compounds in the environment. CRAFT provides decision support to faster estimate the environmental impact of existing chemicals or to discover and optimize better and safer new chemical entities and products.

Features & Functionality

• Generation and evaluation of biodegradation products of chemical substances in the environment
• Generation of degradation trees and pathways weighted by the likelihood of occurrence of the individual reaction steps
• Built-in knowledge base of chemical reactivity and biodegradation derived from the University of Minnesota Biocatalysis and Biodegradation Database
• Extendible knowledge base to include user-defined models and rules for chemical reactivity and biodegradation
• Flexible design to plug-in third party tools or to call external applications
• Optional usage of on-line data sources to collect information about analyzed chemicals, e.g., PubChem
• Generation of printable and editable reports with user-definable level of detail
• Open-source application available under LGPL licensing terms

User Interface

In order to maintain, extend and apply the knowledge base for the evaluation of chemicals, CRAFT consists of two main applications.

• CRAFT Editor - GUI-based program to inspect, modify and extend the contents of the knowledge base
• CRAFT Explorer - GUI-based program providing a wizard-driven interface with a predefined workflow that supports the user during the evaluation session (including command line interface for batch mode execution)

Screenshot

• CRAFT Editor
  
• CRAFT Explorer
  

System Requirements

• Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/Vista
• SUSE Linux systems (Release 9/10, Kernel 2.4/2.6 for x86 and x86_64)
• Mac OS X 10.5 (x86)
• Java™ Runtime Environment 1.6
• Instance of MySQL server 5.x (or higher, default storage engine must be InnoDB)

Additional Info

Downloadable PDFs

• CRAFT program flyer
• CRAFT v.1.0. installation guide
• CRAFT.Editor v.1.0. user manual
• CRAFT.Explorer v.1.0. user manual

Free Downloads

The downloadable packages include both CRAFT Editor and CRAFT Explorer applications, the initial CRAFT knowledge base in a standard SQL and CRAFT export archive (.jex) format as well the program manuals and the installation guide.

• CRAFT v.1.0. setup package for Microsoft Windows operating systems (54 MB)
• CRAFT v.1.0. package for Mac OS X 10.5 and Java 6 (64 bit) (54 MB)
• CRAFT v.1.0. package for other operating systems (Linux, Free BSD etc) (54 MB, may require the installation of additional system components)

Acknowledgments

The development of CRAFT was funded by the European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute of Health and Consumer Protection, Ispra, Italy.