Edited by José L. Medina-Franco, Emma Schymanski, Christoph Steinbeck
Chemical structures are at the core of the research in chemistry. In several applications, the chemical structures available in the physically exemplified chemical space are used. This includes virtual and “on-demand” libraries populated by chemical structures already constructed but not synthesized yet. However, it is well-known that the chemical space is huge and there is an increasing need to automatically generate novel chemical structures. Such need is evident in areas such as drug discovery, metabolomics, and planned organic synthesis.
The main objective of this special collection in the Journal of Cheminformatics is to show recent advances, applications, challenges in the enumeration of chemical structures: from the design to the analysis and use of either small, focused data sets, to large compound libraries. Analysis and handling of the newly constructed chemical structures include the storage, mining, integration of the constructed structures with other existing data sets, and curation.
