Cheminformatics in the Popular Press: The Long Tail of Structural Scaffolds

A recent issue of Wired is running a story about a Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) study on the distribution of scaffold frequencies in the CAS Registry database.

Cheminformatics doesn't often make it into the popular press (or any other kind of press for that matter), so the Wired article is remarkable for that aspect alone.

From the original work (free PDF here):

It seems plausible to expect that the more often a framework has been used as the basis for a compound, the more likely it is to be used in another compound. If many compounds derived from a framework have already been synthesized, these derivatives can serve as a pool of potential starting materials for further syntheses. The availability of published schemes for making these derivatves, or the existence of these desrivates as commercial chemicals, would then facilitate the construction of more compounds based on the same framework. Of course, not all frameworks are equally likely to become the focus of a high degree of synthetic activity. Some frameworks are intrinsically more interesting than others due to their functional importance (e.g., as a building blocks in drug design), and this interest will stimulate the synthesis of derivatives. Once this synthetic activity is initiated, it may be amplified over time by a rich-get-richer process.

With the appearance of dozens of chemical databases and services on the Web in the last couple of years, the opportunities for analyses like this (and many others) can only increase. Who knows what we'll find.