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A systematic virtual screening study on 11 pharmaceutically relevant targets has been conducted to investigate the interrelation between 8 two-dimensional (2D) fingerprinting methods, 13 atom-typing schemes, 13 bit scaling rules, and 12 similarity metrics using the new cheminformatics package Canvas. In total, 157 872 virtual screens were performed to assess the ability of each combination of parameters to identify actives in a database screen. In general, fingerprint methods, such as MOLPRINT2D, Radial, and Dendritic that encode information about local environment beyond simple linear paths outperformed other fingerprint methods. Atom-typing schemes with more specific information, such as Daylight, Mol2, and Carhart were generally superior to more generic atom-typing schemes. Enrichment factors across all targets were improved considerably with the best settings, although no single set of parameters performed optimally on all targets. The size of the addressable bit space for the fingerprints was also explored, and it was found to have a substantial impact on enrichments. Small bit spaces, such as 1024, resulted in many collisions and in a significant degradation in enrichments compared to larger bit spaces that avoid collisions.

We have implemented a naïve Bayesian classifier which models continuous numerical data using a Gaussian distribution. Several cases of interest in the area of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion prediction are presented which demonstrate that this approach is superior to the implementation of naïve Bayesian classifiers in which continuous chemical descriptors are modeled as binary data. We demonstrate that this enhanced performance, upon comparison with other implementations, is independent of the descriptor sets chosen. We also compare the performance of three implementations of naïve Bayesian classifiers with other previously described models.

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We describe and demonstrate a method for the simultaneous, fully flexible alignment of multiple molecules with a common biological activity. The key aspect of the algorithm is that the alignment problem is first solved in a lower dimensional space, in this case using the one-dimensional representations of the molecules. The three-dimensional alignment is then guided by constraints derived from the one-dimensional alignment. We demonstrate using 10 hERG channel blockers, with a total of 72 rotatable bonds, that the one-dimensional alignment is able to effectively isolate key conserved pharmacophoric features and that these conserved features can effectively guide the three-dimensional alignment. Further using 10 estrogen receptor agonists and 5 estrogen receptor antagonists with publicly available cocrystal structures we show that the method is able to produce superpositions comparable to those derived from crystal structures. Finally, we demonstrate, using examples from peptidic CXCR3 agonists, that the method is able to generate reasonable binding hypotheses.

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ChemInform is a weekly Abstracting Service, delivering concise information at a glance that was extracted from about 200 leading journals. To access a ChemInform Abstract of an article which was published elsewhere, please select a “Full Text” option. The original article is trackable via the “References” option.

No abstract