Fragment-Based Descriptors

A particularly good selection of physical properties may be spectra, because they are known to depend strongly on the chemical structure. In fact, different types of spectra carry different kinds of structural information, NMR spectra characterize individual carbon atoms in their molecular environment. They therefore correspond quite closely to fragment-based descriptors, as underlined by the success of approaches to predict NMR spectra by fragment codes (see Section 10.2.3). 

Many different structural descriptors have been developed for similarity searching in chemical databases [4] including 2D fragment based descriptors, 3D descriptors, and descriptors that are based on the physical properties of molecules. More recently, attention has focused on diversity studies and many of the descriptors applied in similarity searching are now being applied in diversity studies. Structural descriptors are basically numerical representations of structures that allow pairwise (dis)similarities between structures to be measured through the use of similarity coefficients. Many diversity metrics have been devised that are based on calculating structural (dis)similarities, some of these are described below. 

---