Chemoinformatics Approach for the Design and Screening of Focused Virtual Libraries

Abstract

It is challenging to handle a large volume of molecular data without appropriate tools. Here, we describe the need and the approaches for the development of focussed virtual libraries to design efficient molecules and optimize them for lead generation. The experimental chemists and biologists are more interested in properties of chemicals and their response to biological system in both beneficial and adverse effects context rather than just their structures. In this chapter, the focus is to relate newly designed chemical structures to their predicted activity, property or toxicity. Property prediction tools save time, money and lives of experimental animals. They come in handy while taking informed decisions especially in certain cases involving pharmacodynamic studies of drug molecules in humans where there are inevitable ethical and safety concerns. Property prediction is an important component in virtual screening which is at the heart of drug design and the most important step where chemoinformatics plays a major role. The other fields where structure–activity relation-based principles hold good for virtual screening are agrochemicals and environmental science, specifically the toxicity and biodegradability prediction of pollutant molecules. In this chapter, we will show how to design software tools to handle generation of focussed virtual libraries from a given set of molecules with common features, fragments or bioactivity spectrum.