MolBLOCKS: Decomposing small molecule sets and uncovering enriched fragments

Abstract

The chemical structures of biomolecules, whether naturally occurring or synthetic, are composed of functionally important building blocks. Given a set of small molecules - for example, those known to bind a particular protein - computationally decomposing them into chemically meaningful fragments can help elucidate their functional properties, and may be useful for designing novel compounds with similar properties. Here we introduce molBLOCKS, a suite of programs for breaking down sets of small molecules into fragments according to a predefined set of chemical rules, clustering the resulting fragments, and uncovering statistically enriched fragments. Among other applications, our software should be a great aid in large-scale chemical analysis of ligands binding specific targets of interest.