Metabolite Similarity & Dirty Compounds

Edit 10/9/14 – Updated statistics for the 1024 bit fingerprints There’s been some discussion about a paper by O’Hagan et al that have proposed a Rule of 0.5 that states that 90% of approved drugs exhibit a Tanimoto similarity > 0.5 to one or more human metabolites. Their analysis is based on metabolites listed in […]

Fingerprint Similarity Searches in MongoDB

A few of my recent projects have involved the use of MongoDB, primarily for the ease afforded by a schemaless environment. Sometime back I had investigated the use of MongoDB to store chemical structure data, though those efforts did not actually query structures per se; instead they queried for precomputed numeric or text properties. So […]

New version of fingerprint (3.4.9) – faster Dice similarity matrices

I’ve just pushed a new version of the fingerprint package that contains an update provided by Abhik Seal that significantly speeds up calculation of pairwise similarity matrices when using the Dice similarity method. A ran a simple comparison using different numbers of random fingerprints (1024 bits, with 512 bits set to one, randomly) and measured […]

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 […]

Benchmarking the CDK Hybridization Fingerprinter

This morning Egon reported that he had implemented a new fingerprinter for the CDK, which only considered hybridization rather than looking at aromaticity. As a result this approach does not require aromaticity perception. I took a quick look to see how it performs in a virtual screening benchmark. Firstly, it’s faster than the other CDK […]