Walking through the Hierarchy of Chemical Structure Representation

Walking through the Hierarchy of Chemical Structure Representation 

To code the configuration of a molecule various methods are described in Section 2.8. In particular, the use of wedge symbols clearly demonstrates the value added if stereodescriptors are included in the chemical structure information. The inclusion of stereochemical information gives a more realistic view of the actual spatial arrangement of the atoms of the molecule imder consideration, and can therefore be regarded as between the 2D (topological) and the 3D representation of a chemical structure. 

Clearly, the next step is the handling of a molecule as a real object with a spatial extension in 3D space. Quite often this is also a mandatory step, because in most cases the 3D structure of a molecule is closely related to a large variety of physical, chemical, and biological properties. In addition, the fundamental importance of an unambiguous definition of stereochemistry becomes obvious, if the 3D structure of a molecule needs to be derived from its chemical graph. The moleofles of stereoisomeric compounds differ in their spatial features and often exhibit quite different properties. Therefore, stereochemical information should always be taken into ac-count if chiral atom centers are present in a chemical structure. 

Before we go into further detail on the handling of chemical structures in 3D space from the chemoinformatics point of view, it should be noted that there 

The representation of molecular surfaces, including the display of molecular surface properties, can be regarded as the next level of this hierarchy, but will be addressed in Sections 2,10 and 2,11 in this volume. 

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