Representation and Substructure Searching of 3D Chemical Structures

The last few years have seen substantial interest in the development of database-searching systems for files of 3D structures. The atom coordinate information in such databases is obtained either experimentally, usually from the Cambridge Structural Database, which contains X-ray structures that have been reported in the published literature,or by the use of a struaure-builder, which is a computer program that calculates an approximate 3D structure from a 2D connection table. - The best known of such programs is CONCORD, which uses a knowledge base of rules that describe preferred molecular conformational patterns and a simplified force-field. CONCORD has been widely used for the conversion of both in-house and public databases of 2D structures to 3D form. 

Screens for 3D searching typically consist of a pair of atoms, together with an associated distance range that represents the separation of the two atoms. For example, a screen might consist of a nitrogen atom separated from 

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