Pharmacophore mapping molecular modelling

ALADDIN (91). DISCO uses a rapid technique, clique detection, to identify maps from the set of all potential pharmacophore points. Typically, the maps are generated in a few minutes of CPU time and the results can be viewed in a variety of molecular modeling programs. 

The essential feature of the AAA is a comparison of active and inactive molecules. A commonly accepted hypothesis to explain the lack of activity of inactive molecules that possess the pharmacophoric conformation is that their molecular volume, when presenting the pharmacophore, exceeds the receptor excluded volume. This additional volume apparently is filled by the receptor and is unavailable for ligand binding this volume is termed the receptor essential volume [3]. Following this approach, the density maps for each of the inactive compounds (in their pharm conformations superimposed with that of active compounds) were constructed the difference between the combined inactive compound density maps and the receptor excluded volume represents the receptor essential volume. These receptor-mapping techniques supplied detailed topographical data that allowed a steric model of the D[ receptor site to be proposed. 

These pharmacophore techniques are different in format from the traditional pharmacophore definitions. They can not be easily visualized and mapped to the molecular structures rather, they are encoded as keys or topological/topographical descriptors. Nonetheless, they capture the same idea as the classic pharmacophore concept. Furthermore, this formalism is quite useful in building quantitative predictive models that can be used to classify and predict biological activities. 

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