Words, Sentences, Fragments & Molecules

For some time I have been thinking of the analogy between linguistics (and text mining of language data) and chemistry, specifically from the point of view of fragments (though, the relationship between the two fields is actually quite long and deep, since many techniques from IR have been employed in cheminformatics). For example, atoms and […]

SALI in Bulk

Sometime back John Van Drie and I had developed the Structure Activity Landscape Index (SALI), which is a way to quantify activity cliffs – pairs of compounds which are structurally very similar but have significantly different activities. In preparation for a talk on SALI at the Boston ACS, I was looking for SAR datasets that […]

From Theory to Practice

Some time back, John Van Drie and myself had done some work on characterizing structure-activity cliffs, which are molecules that have very similar structures but very different activities. The term originated from Maggiora, who suggested that this was a reason for the failure of many QSAR models. At the same time, such cliffs can represent […]