Algorithm for Reaction Classification

Abstract

Reaction classification has important applications, and many approaches to classification have been applied. Our own algorithm tests all maximum common substructures (MCS) between all reactant and product molecules in order to find an atom mapping containing the minimum chemical distance (MCD). Recent publications have concluded that new MCS algorithms need to be compared with existing methods in a reproducible environment, preferably on a generalized test set, yet the number of test sets available is small, and they are not truly representative of the range of reactions that occur in real reaction databases. We have designed a challenging test set of reactions and are making it publicly available and usable with InfoChem's software or other classification algorithms. We supply a representative set of example reactions, grouped into different levels of difficulty, from a large number of reaction databases that chemists actually encounter in practice, in order to demonstrate the basic requirements for a mapping algorithm to detect the reaction centers in a consistent way. We invite the scientific community to contribute to the future extension and improvement of this data set, to achieve the goal of a common standard.