Similarity Matrices in Parallel

Today I got an email asking whether it’d be possible to speed up a fingerprint similarity matrix calculation in R. Now, pairwise similarity matrix calculations (whether they’re for molecules or sequences or anything else) are by definition quadratic in nature. So performing these calculations for large collections aren’t always feasible – in many cases, it’s […]

PAINS Substructure Filters as SMARTS

Sometime back Baell et al published an interesting paper describing a set of substructure filters to identify compounds that are promiscuous in high throughput biochemical screens. They termed these compounds Pan Assay Interference Compounds or PAINS. There are a variety of functional groups that are known to be problematic in HTS assays. The reasons for […]

Updates to R Packages

I’ve uploaded a new version of fingerprint (v 3.4) which now supports feature fingerprints – fingerprints that are represented as variable length vectors of numbers or strings. An example would be circular fingerprints. Now, when reading fingerprints you have to indicate whether you’re loading binary fingerprints or not (via the binary argument in fp.read). A […]