Analysing Differential Activity in Dose Response Screens

My colleagues and I recently published a paper where we explored a few methods to identify differential behavior in dose response screens. While there is an extensive literature about analyzing differential effects in genomic data (e.g. mciroarrays, RNAseq), these methods are based on distributional assumptions that holds for genomic data. This is not necessarily the […]

Hit Selection When You’re Strapped for Cash

I came across a paper from Chaput et al that describes an approach to hit selection from a virtual screen (using docking), when follow-up resources are limited (a common scenario in many academic labs). Their approach is based on using multiple docking programs. As they (and others) have pointed out, there is a wide divergence […]

Cryptography & Chemical Structure Search

Encryption of chemical information has not been a very common topic in cheminformatics. There was an ACS symposium in 2005 (summary) that had a number of presentations on the topic of “safe exchange” of chemical information – i.e., exchanging information on chemical structures without sharing the structures themselves. The common thread running through many presentations was to […]

Maximally Bridging Rings (or, Doing What the Authors Should’ve Done)

Recently I came across a paper from Marth et al that described a method based on network analysis to support retrosynthetic planning, particularly for complex natural products. I’m no synthetic chemist so I can’t comment on the relevance or importance of the targets or the significance of the proposed approach to planning a synthetic route. […]