Atom-pair Fingerprint Research Articles

Analysis and Comparison of Vector Space and Metric Space Representations in QSAR Modeling.

The performance of quantitative structure–activity relationship (QSAR) models largely depends on the relevance of the selected molecular representation used as input data matrices. This work presents a thorough comparative analysis of two main categories of molecular representations (vector space and metric space) for fitting robust machine learning models in QSAR problems. For the assessment of these methods, seven different molecular representations that included RDKit descriptors, five different fingerprints types (MACCS, PubChem, FP2-based, Atom Pair, and ECFP4), and a graph matching approach (non-contiguous atom matching structure similarity; NAMS) in both vector space and metric space, were subjected to state-of-art machine learning methods that included different dimensionality reduction methods (feature selection and linear dimensionality reduction). Five distinct QSAR data sets were used for direct assessment and analysis. Results show that, in general, metric-space and vector-space representations are able to produce equivalent models, but there are significant differences between individual approaches. The NAMS-based similarity approach consistently outperformed most fingerprint representations in model quality, closely followed by Atom Pair fingerprints. To further verify these findings, the metric space-based models were fitted to the same data sets with the closest neighbors removed. These latter results further strengthened the above conclusions. The metric space graph-based approach appeared significantly superior to the other representations, albeit at a significant computational cost.

PubChem and ChEMBL beyond Lipinski.

Seven million of the currently 94 million entries in the PubChem database break at least one of the four Lipinski constraints for oral bioavailability, 183,185 of which are also found in the ChEMBL database. These non-Lipinski PubChem (NLP) and ChEMBL (NLC) subsets are interesting because they contain new modalities that can display biological properties not accessible to small molecule drugs. Unfortunately, the current search tools in PubChem and ChEMBL are designed for small molecules and are not well suited to explore these subsets, which therefore remain poorly appreciated. Herein we report MXFP (macromolecule extended atom-pair fingerprint), a 217-D fingerprint tailored to analyze large molecules in terms of molecular shape and pharmacophores. We implement MXFP in two web-based applications, the first one to visualize NLP and NLC interactively using Faerun (http://faerun.gdb.tools/), the second one to perform MXFP nearest neighbor searches in NLP and NLC (http://similaritysearch.gdb.tools/). We show that these tools provide a meaningful insight into the diversity of large molecules in NLP and NLC. The interactive tools presented here are publicly available at http://gdb.unibe.ch and can be used freely to explore and better understand the diversity of non-Lipinski molecules in PubChem and ChEMBL.

WebMolCS: A Web-Based Interface for Visualizing Molecules in Three-Dimensional Chemical Spaces.

The concept of chemical space provides a convenient framework to analyze large collections of molecules by placing them in property spaces where distances represent similarities. Here we report webMolCS, a new type of web-based interface visualizing up to 5000 user-defined molecules in six different three-dimensional (3D) chemical spaces obtained by principal component analysis or similarity mapping of multidimensional property spaces describing composition (MQN: 42D molecular quantum numbers, SMIfp: 34D SMILES fingerprint), shapes and pharmacophores (APfp: 20D atom pair fingerprint, Xfp: 55D category extended atom pair fingerprint), and substructures (Sfp: 1024D binary substructure fingerprint, ECfp4:1024D extended connectivity fingerprint). Each molecule is shown as a sphere, and its structure appears on mouse over. The sphere is color-coded by similarity to the first compound in the list, by the list rank, or by a user-defined value, which reveals the relationship between any property encoded by these values and structural similarities. WebMolCS is freely available at www.gdb.unibe.ch .

Comparing structural fingerprints using a literature-based similarity benchmark.

BackgroundThe concept of molecular similarity is one of the central ideas in cheminformatics, despite the fact that it is ill-defined and rather difficult to assess objectively. Here we propose a practical definition of molecular similarity in the context of drug discovery: molecules A and B are similar if a medicinal chemist would be likely to synthesise and test them around the same time as part of the same medicinal chemistry program. The attraction of such a definition is that it matches one of the key uses of similarity measures in early-stage drug discovery. If we make the assumption that molecules in the same compound activity table in a medicinal chemistry paper were considered similar by the authors of the paper, we can create a dataset of similar molecules from the medicinal chemistry literature. Furthermore, molecules with decreasing levels of similarity to a reference can be found by either ordering molecules in an activity table by their activity, or by considering activity tables in different papers which have at least one molecule in common.ResultsUsing this procedure with activity data from ChEMBL, we have created two benchmark datasets for structural similarity that can be used to guide the development of improved measures. Compared to similar results from a virtual screen, these benchmarks are an order of magnitude more sensitive to differences between fingerprints both because of their size and because they avoid loss of statistical power due to the use of mean scores or ranks. We measure the performance of 28 different fingerprints on the benchmark sets and compare the results to those from the Riniker and Landrum (J Cheminf 5:26, 2013. doi:10.1186/1758-2946-5-26) ligand-based virtual screening benchmark.ConclusionsExtended-connectivity fingerprints of diameter 4 and 6 are among the best performing fingerprints when ranking diverse structures by similarity, as is the topological torsion fingerprint. However, when ranking very close analogues, the atom pair fingerprint outperforms the others tested. When ranking diverse structures or carrying out a virtual screen, we find that the performance of the ECFP fingerprints significantly improves if the bit-vector length is increased from 1024 to 16,384.Graphical abstractAn example series from one of the benchmark datasets. Each fingerprint is assessed on its ability to reproduce a specific series order.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13321-016-0148-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Web-based 3D-visualization of the DrugBank chemical space.

BackgroundSimilarly to the periodic table for elements, chemical space offers an organizing principle for representing the diversity of organic molecules, usually in the form of multi-dimensional property spaces that are subjected to dimensionality reduction methods to obtain 3D-spaces or 2D-maps suitable for visual inspection. Unfortunately, tools to look at chemical space on the internet are currently very limited.ResultsHerein we present webDrugCS, a web application freely available at www.gdb.unibe.ch to visualize DrugBank (www.drugbank.ca, containing over 6000 investigational and approved drugs) in five different property spaces. WebDrugCS displays 3D-clouds of color-coded grid points representing molecules, whose structural formula is displayed on mouse over with an option to link to the corresponding molecule page at the DrugBank website. The 3D-clouds are obtained by principal component analysis of high dimensional property spaces describing constitution and topology (42D molecular quantum numbers MQN), structural features (34D SMILES fingerprint SMIfp), molecular shape (20D atom pair fingerprint APfp), pharmacophores (55D atom category extended atom pair fingerprint Xfp) and substructures (1024D binary substructure fingerprint Sfp). User defined molecules can be uploaded as SMILES lists and displayed together with DrugBank. In contrast to 2D-maps where many compounds fold onto each other, these 3D-spaces have a comparable resolution to their parent high-dimensional chemical space.ConclusionTo the best of our knowledge webDrugCS is the first publicly available web tool for interactive visualization and exploration of the DrugBank chemical space in 3D. WebDrugCS works on computers, tablets and phones, and facilitates the visual exploration of DrugBank to rapidly learn about the structural diversity of small molecule drugs.Graphical abstractwebDrugCS visualization of DrugBank projected in 3D MQN space color-coded by ring count, with pointer showing the drug 5-fluorouracil.

Stereoselective virtual screening of the ZINC database using atom pair 3D-fingerprints.

BackgroundTools to explore large compound databases in search for analogs of query molecules provide a strategically important support in drug discovery to help identify available analogs of any given reference or hit compound by ligand based virtual screening (LBVS). We recently showed that large databases can be formatted for very fast searching with various 2D-fingerprints using the city-block distance as similarity measure, in particular a 2D-atom pair fingerprint (APfp) and the related category extended atom pair fingerprint (Xfp) which efficiently encode molecular shape and pharmacophores, but do not perceive stereochemistry. Here we investigated related 3D-atom pair fingerprints to enable rapid stereoselective searches in the ZINC database (23.2 million 3D structures).ResultsMolecular fingerprints counting atom pairs at increasing through-space distance intervals were designed using either all atoms (16-bit 3DAPfp) or different atom categories (80-bit 3DXfp). These 3D-fingerprints retrieved molecular shape and pharmacophore analogs (defined by OpenEye ROCS scoring functions) of 110,000 compounds from the Cambridge Structural Database with equal or better accuracy than the 2D-fingerprints APfp and Xfp, and showed comparable performance in recovering actives from decoys in the DUD database. LBVS by 3DXfp or 3DAPfp similarity was stereoselective and gave very different analogs when starting from different diastereomers of the same chiral drug. Results were also different from LBVS with the parent 2D-fingerprints Xfp or APfp. 3D- and 2D-fingerprints also gave very different results in LBVS of folded molecules where through-space distances between atom pairs are much shorter than topological distances.Conclusions3DAPfp and 3DXfp are suitable for stereoselective searches for shape and pharmacophore analogs of query molecules in large databases. Web-browsers for searching ZINC by 3DAPfp and 3DXfp similarity are accessible at www.gdb.unibe.ch and should provide useful assistance to drug discovery projects.Graphical abstractAtom pair fingerprints based on through-space distances (3DAPfp) provide better shape encoding than atom pair fingerprints based on topological distances (APfp) as measured by the recovery of ROCS shape analogs by fp similarity.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13321-014-0051-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Development of a novel fingerprint for chemical reactions and its application to large-scale reaction classification and similarity.

Fingerprint methods applied to molecules have proven to be useful for similarity determination and as inputs to machine-learning models. Here, we present the development of a new fingerprint for chemical reactions and validate its usefulness in building machine-learning models and in similarity assessment. Our final fingerprint is constructed as the difference of the atom-pair fingerprints of products and reactants and includes agents via calculated physicochemical properties. We validated the fingerprints on a large data set of reactions text-mined from granted United States patents from the last 40 years that have been classified using a substructure-based expert system. We applied machine learning to build a 50-class predictive model for reaction-type classification that correctly predicts 97% of the reactions in an external test set. Impressive accuracies were also observed when applying the classifier to reactions from an in-house electronic laboratory notebook. The performance of the novel fingerprint for assessing reaction similarity was evaluated by a cluster analysis that recovered 48 out of 50 of the reaction classes with a median F-score of 0.63 for the clusters. The data sets used for training and primary validation as well as all python scripts required to reproduce the analysis are provided in the Supporting Information.

Atom pair 2D-fingerprints perceive 3D-molecular shape and pharmacophores for very fast virtual screening of ZINC and GDB-17.

Three-dimensional (3D) molecular shape and pharmacophores are important determinants of the biological activity of organic molecules; however, a precise computation of 3D-shape is generally too slow for virtual screening of very large databases. A reinvestigation of the concept of atom pairs initially reported by Carhart et al. and extended by Schneider et al. showed that a simple atom pair fingerprint (APfp) counting atom pairs at increasing topological distances in 2D-structures without atom property assignment correlates with various representations of molecular shape extracted from the 3D-structures. A related 55-dimensional atom pair fingerprint extended with atom properties (Xfp) provided an efficient pharmacophore fingerprint with good performance for ligand-based virtual screening such as the recovery of active compounds from decoys in DUD, and overlap with the ROCS 3D-pharmacophore scoring function. The APfp and Xfp data were organized for web-based extremely fast nearest-neighbor searching in ZINC (13.5 M compounds) and GDB-17 (50 M random subset) freely accessible at www.gdb.unibe.ch .

PyDPI: Freely Available Python Package for Chemoinformatics, Bioinformatics, and Chemogenomics Studies

The rapidly increasing amount of publicly available data in biology and chemistry enables researchers to revisit interaction problems by systematic integration and analysis of heterogeneous data. Herein, we developed a comprehensive python package to emphasize the integration of chemoinformatics and bioinformatics into a molecular informatics platform for drug discovery. PyDPI (drug-protein interaction with Python) is a powerful python toolkit for computing commonly used structural and physicochemical features of proteins and peptides from amino acid sequences, molecular descriptors of drug molecules from their topology, and protein-protein interaction and protein-ligand interaction descriptors. It computes 6 protein feature groups composed of 14 features that include 52 descriptor types and 9890 descriptors, 9 drug feature groups composed of 13 descriptor types that include 615 descriptors. In addition, it provides seven types of molecular fingerprint systems for drug molecules, including topological fingerprints, electro-topological state (E-state) fingerprints, MACCS keys, FP4 keys, atom pair fingerprints, topological torsion fingerprints, and Morgan/circular fingerprints. By combining different types of descriptors from drugs and proteins in different ways, interaction descriptors representing protein-protein or drug-protein interactions could be conveniently generated. These computed descriptors can be widely used in various fields relevant to chemoinformatics, bioinformatics, and chemogenomics. PyDPI is freely available via https://sourceforge.net/projects/pydpicao/.

Chemically Advanced Template Search (CATS) for Scaffold‐Hopping and Prospective Target Prediction for ‘Orphan’ Molecules

Drug discovery is driven by the identification of new chemical entities (NCEs).1,2 Virtual screening and de novo design techniques have been proven to serve this purpose, thereby complementing experimental biochemical and biological approaches.3 Still, it remains a matter of debate, which particular molecular representation and similarity index are preferable for a given drug target in order to identify appropriate NCEs with minimal synthetic and testing effort involved.4 Ligand-based chemical similarity approaches have been effectively applied to large-scale activity and target prediction for known drugs, some of the prominent methods being PASS developed by Poroikov et al.,5 the techniques conceived by Mestres and co-workers,6 and the similarity ensemble approach (SEA) implemented by the Shoichet group.7 Here, we compared several popular two-dimensional molecular representations for their ability to retrieve actives (enrichment potential) and chemotypes (scaffold-hopping potential) from a collection of druglike bioactive compounds. Subsequently the applied chemical advanced template search (CATS)8 was applied to predicting potential drug targets for a virtually assembled combinatorial compound library, from which we synthesized and successfully tested candidate compounds. The results demonstrate that CATS is not only suited for its intended purpose of NCE retrieval by scaffold-hopping,9 but also for reliable target profiling of ‘orphan’ virtual molecules.10 It thereby complements the suite of available validated tools for target prediction.