This book is the first monograph that summarizes innovative applications of efficient chemoinformatics approaches towards the goal of screening large chemical libraries. The focus on virtual screening expands chemoinformatics beyond its traditional boundaries as a synthetic and data-analytical area of research towards its recognition as a predictive and decision support scientific discipline. The approaches discussed by the contributors to the monograph rely on chemoinformatics concepts such as:

-representation of molecules using multiple descriptors of chemical structures;
-advanced chemical similarity calculations in multidimensional descriptor spaces;
-the use of advanced machine learning and data mining approaches for building quantitative and predictive structure activity models;
-the use of chemoinformatics methodologies for the analysis of drug-likeness and property prediction;
-the emerging trend on combining chemoinformatics and bioinformatics concepts in structure based drug discovery.

The chapters of the book are organized in a logical flow that a typical chemoinformatics project would follow - from structure representation and comparison to data analysis and model building to applications of structure-property relationship models for hit identification and chemical library design. It opens with the overview of modern methods of compounds library design, followed by a chapter devoted to molecular similarity analysis. Four sections describe virtual screening based on the using of molecular fragments, 2D pharmacophores and 3D pharmacophores.

Application of fuzzy pharmacophores for libraries design is the subject of the next chapter followed by a chapter dealing with QSAR studies based on local molecular parameters. Probabilistic approaches based on 2D descriptors in assessment of biological activities are also described with an overview of the modern methods and software for ADME prediction.

The book ends with a chapter describing the new approach of coding the receptor binding sites and their respective ligands in multidimensional chemical descriptor space that affords an interesting and efficient alternative to traditional docking and screening techniques. Ligand-based approaches, which are in the focus of this work, are more computationally efficient compared to structure-based virtual screening and there are very few books related to modern developments in this field.

The focus on extending the experiences accumulated in traditional areas of chemoinformatics research such as Quantitative Structure Activity Relationships (QSAR) or chemical similarity searching towards virtual screening make the theme of this monograph essential reading for researchers in the area of computer-aided drug discovery. However, due to its generic data-analytical focus there will be a growing application of chemoinformatics approaches in multiple areas of chemical and biological research such as synthesis planning, nanotechnology, proteomics, physical and analytical chemistry and chemical genomics.