The hierarchical editing language for macromolecules (HELM) is a method of describing complex biological molecules.
It is a notation that is machine readable to render the composition and structure of peptides, proteins, oligonucleotides, and related small molecule linkers.
[2] The need for HELM became obvious as researchers began working on modeling and computational projects involving molecules and engineered biomolecules of this type.
[6] The informatics company BIOVIA developed a modified Molfile format called the Self-Contained Sequence Representation (SCSR) A standard which can incorporate individual attempts to solve the problem and be used universally and avoid proliferating standards is a goal of HELM.
The alliance is now composed of informatics experts and researchers from industry, academia and life science service organizations.