Virtual screening molecular similarity/diversity

The concepts of molecular similarity (1-3) and molecular diversity (4,5) play important roles in modern approaches to computer-aided molecular design. Molecular similarity provides the simplest, and most widely used, method for virtual screening and underlies the use of clustering methods on chemical databases. Molecular diversity analysis provides a range of tools for exploring the extent to which a set of molecules spans structural space, and underlies many approaches to compound selection and to the design of combinatorial libraries. Many different similarity and diversity methods have been described in the literature, and new methods continue to appear. This raises the question of how one can compare different methods, so as to identify the most appropriate method(s) for some particular application this chapter provides an overview of the ways in which this can be carried out, illustrating such comparisons by,... 

In this chapter, we will give a brief introduction to the basic concepts of chemoinformatics and their relevance to chemical library design. In Section 2, we will describe chemical representation, molecular data, and molecular data mining in computer we will introduce some of the chemoinformatics concepts such as molecular descriptors, chemical space, dimension reduction, similarity and diversity and we will review the most useful methods and applications of chemoinformatics, the quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR), the quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR), multiobjective optimization, and virtual screening. In Section 3, we will outline some of the elements of library design and connect chemoinformatics tools, such as molecular similarity, molecular diversity, and multiple objective optimizations, with designing optimal libraries. Finally, we will put library design into perspective in Section 4. 

Applications of molecular descriptors are as diverse as their definitions. The important classes of applications include QSAR and/or QSPR, similarity, diversity, predictive models for virtual screening and/or data mining, data visualization. We will discuss briefly some of these applications in the next sections. 

Virtual screening, with experimental verification by biological screening, has provided a validation of many of the molecular similarity 1 diversity methods used for combinatorial library design, and some ligand-based approaches and examples are discussed in Section 3. 

Design, creation, analysis, management, recovery, organization, distribution, visualization and use chemical information Storage and retreival Database mining Molecular descriptors Similarity methods Diversity analysis Library design Virtual screening... 

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