Deep generative models provide a powerful solution for the de novo design of molecules. However, the majority of existing methods only generate molecules for a single target. Generating molecules with biological activities against multiple specific targets and desired properties remains an extremely difficult challenge. In this study, we propose a novel 3D molecule generation framework based on reinforcement

Recent progress in computational biology has driven the development of machine learning models for predicting protein post-translational modification sites. However, challenges such as data imbalance and limited sequence-context representation continue to hinder prediction accuracy, particularly for less frequent modifications like succinylation. In this study, we propose RLSuccSite, a reinforcement

Persistent air quality pollution poses a serious threat to human health, and is one of the action points that policy makers should monitor according to the Directive 2008/50/EC. While deploying a massive network of hyperlocal sensors could provide extensive monitoring, this approach cannot generate geospatial continuous data and present several challenges in terms of logistics. Thus, developing accurate

We introduce PoLiGenX, a novel generative model for de novo ligand design that employs latent-conditioned, target-aware equivariant diffusion. Our approach leverages the conditioning of the ligand generation process on reference molecules located within a specific protein pocket. By doing so, PoLiGenX generates shape-similar ligands that are adapted to the target pocket, enabling effective applications

While chemoinformatics is a well-established scientific field, its integration into university curricula is rarely discussed. In this work, we share our experience in developing a chemoinformatics curriculum at the University of Strasbourg and highlight the main challenges in higher education for this discipline.

Protein fitness prediction plays a crucial role in the advancement of protein engineering endeavours. However, the combinatorial complexity of the protein sequence space and the limited availability of assay-labelled data hinder the efficient optimization of protein properties. Data-driven strategies utilizing machine learning methods have emerged as a promising solution, yet their dependence on labelled

Atom mapping involves identifying the correspondence between individual atoms in reactant molecules and their counterparts in product molecules. This process is crucial for gaining deeper insight into reaction mechanisms, such as defining reaction templates and determining which chemical bonds are formed or broken during a reaction. However, reliable atom mapping data are often limited or incomplete

Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) have become indispensable tools for modern research laboratories, facilitating data management, collaboration, and documentation of scientific experiments. However, the proliferation of diverse ELN platforms poses challenges for researchers who need to seamlessly exchange data between different systems. In this paper, we present ELNdataBridge, a novel server-based solution

We present Moldrug, a computational tool for accelerating the hit-to-lead phase in structure-based drug design. Moldrug explores the chemical space using structural modifications suggested by the CReM library and by optimizing an adaptable fitness function with a genetic algorithm. Moldrug is complemented by Moldrug-Dashboard, a cross-platform and user-friendly graphical interface tailored for the

Predicting surfactant adsorption using the currently available isotherm model is limited to one or two independent variables: equilibrium concentration and temperature. This study aims to develop an adsorption model that includes molecular features, testing conditions, and solid properties in the model. A Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) was structured by integrating adsorption isotherm into

Similarity searching is a mainstay in cheminformatics that is generally used to identify compounds with desired properties. For small molecular fragments, similarity calculations based on standard descriptors often have limited utility for establishing meaningful similarity relationships due to feature sparseness. As an alternative, we have adapted the concept of context-depending word pair similarity

Untargeted metabolomics can comprehensively map the chemical space of a biome, but is limited by low annotation rates (< 10%). We used chemical characteristics vectors, consisting of molecular fingerprints or chemical compound classes, predicted from mass spectrometry data, to characterize compounds and samples. These chemical characteristics vectors (CCVs) estimate the fraction of compounds with specific

Efficient and reliable prediction of molecular properties, such as water solubility, hydration free energy, lipophilicity, and quantum mechanical properties, is essential for rational compound design in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have significantly advanced molecular property prediction tasks, their high memory footprint, computational demands, and

The field of molecular representation has witnessed a shift towards models trained on molecular structures represented by strings or graphs, with chemical information encoded in nodes and bonds. Graph-based representations offer a more realistic depiction and support 3D geometry and conformer-based augmentation. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Graph-based Transformer models (GTs) represent two paradigms

Named entities, such as chemicals/drugs, genes/proteins, and diseases, and their associations are not only important components of biomedical literature, but also the foundation of creating biomedical knowledgebases and knowledge graphs. This work addresses the challenges of expressing co-occurrence associations between named entities extracted from a biomedical literature corpus in a machine-readable

Cellulose, a highly versatile material, faces challenges in processing due to its limited solubility in common solvents. Ionic liquids have been found to possess high solvating capacities for cellulose. However, the experimental development of ionic liquids with optimal cellulose solubilities remains a time-consuming trial-and-error process. In this work, a virtual molecular library containing billions

Quantum computing is at the forefront of technological advancement and has the potential to revolutionize various fields, including quantum chemistry. Choosing an appropriate quantum programming language becomes critical as quantum education and research increase. In this paper, we comprehensively compare two leading quantum programming languages, Qiskit and PennyLane, focusing on their suitability

The field of protein-ligand pose prediction has seen significant advances in recent years, with machine learning-based methods now being commonly used in lieu of classical docking methods or even to predict all-atom protein-ligand complex structures. Most contemporary studies focus on the accuracy and physical plausibility of ligand placement to determine pose quality, often neglecting a direct assessment

This work presents the LabIMotion extension for the Chemotion Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN), expanding its capabilities from organic chemistry to support interdisciplinary research and enabling the description of workflows. LabIMotion enhances documentation by introducing customizable components structured across three levels—Elements, Segments, and Datasets—enabling flexible, hierarchical organization

Toxicity is a critical hurdle in drug development, often causing the late-stage failure of promising compounds. Existing computational prediction models often focus on single-organ toxicity. However, avoiding toxicity of an organ, such as reducing gastrointestinal side effects, may inadvertently lead to toxicity in another organ, as seen in the real case of rofecoxib, which was withdrawn due to increased

Quantitative Structure–Property Relationship studies (QSPR), often referred to interchangeably as QSAR, seek to establish a mapping between molecular structure and an arbitrary target property. Historically this was done on a target-by-target basis with new descriptors being devised to specifically map to a given target. Today software packages exist that calculate thousands of these descriptors, enabling

Chemical synthesis planning has considerably benefited from advances in the field of machine learning. Neural networks can reliably and accurately predict reactions leading to a given, possibly complex, molecule. In this work we focus on algorithms for assembling such predictions to a full synthesis plan that, starting from simple building blocks, produces a given target molecule, a procedure known

Today, drug discovery and development is one of the fields where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used extensively. Therefore, this study aims to systematically analyze the scientific literature on the application of AI in drug discovery and development to understand the evolution, trends, and key contributors within this rapidly growing field. By leveraging various bibliometric indicators and visualization

Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are actively applied in drug discovery, such as virtual screening, wherein appropriate molecular representation is critical. Conventional compound representations have limited use because they cannot encode the 3D spatial arrangement of atoms. An atom pair map (APM) represents a compound using a numerical matrix that encodes the physicochemical properties

Organic anion transporting polypeptides (OATPs) are membrane transporters crucial for drug uptake and distribution in the human body. OATPs can mediate drug-drug interactions (DDIs) in which the interaction of one drug with an OATP impairs the uptake of another drug, resulting in potentially fatal pharmacological effects. Predicting OATP-mediated DDIs is challenging, due to limited information on OATP

In this study, we introduce a novel approach for predicting two key drug properties, blood–brain barrier (BBB) permeability and human intestinal absorption via Caco-2 permeability. Our methodology centers around a specialized neural network, the atom transformer-based Message Passing Neural Network (MPNN), which we have combined with contrastive learning techniques to enhance the process of representing

Post-translational modifications (PTMs) play a crucial role in allowing cells to expand the functionality of their proteins and adaptively regulate their signaling pathways. Defects in PTMs have been linked to numerous developmental disorders and human diseases, including cancer, diabetes, heart, neurodegenerative and metabolic diseases. PTMs are important targets in drug discovery, as they can significantly

The cytochrome P450 (CYP) superfamily metabolises a wide range of compounds; however, drug-induced CYP inhibition can lead to adverse interactions. Identifying potential CYP inhibitors is crucial for safe drug administration. This study investigated the application of deep learning techniques to the prediction of CYP inhibition, focusing on the challenges posed by limited datasets for CYP2B6 and CYP2C8

The electron density is an important object in quantum chemistry that is crucial for many downstream tasks in drug design. Recent deep learning approaches predict the electron density around a molecule from atom types and atom positions. Most of these methods use the plane wave (PW) numerical method as a source of ground-truth training data. However, the drug design field mostly uses the Linear Combination

Assay interference caused by small organic compounds continues to pose formidable challenges to early drug discovery. Various computational methods have been developed to identify compounds likely to cause assay interference. However, due to the scarcity of data available for model development, the predictive accuracy and applicability of these approaches are limited. In this work, we present E-GuARD

We present a method for creating RDKit-parsable SMILES for transition metal complexes (TMCs) based on xyz-coordinates and overall charge of the complex. This can be viewed as an extension to the program xyz2mol that does the same for organic molecules. The only dependency is RDKit, which makes it widely applicable. One thing that has been lacking when it comes to generating SMILES from structure for

With over 3000 representatives, the monoterpene indole alkaloids (MIAs) class is among the most diverse families of plant natural products. The MS/MS spectral space exploration of these complex compounds using chemoinformatic and computational mass spectrometry tools offers a valuable opportunity to extract and share chemical insights from this emblematic family of natural products (NPs). In this work

Protein-ligand docking is a computational method routinely used in many structural biology applications. It usually involves one receptor and one ligand. The docking of multiple ligands, however, can be important in several situations, such as the study of synergistic effects, substrate and product inhibition, or competitive binding. This can be a challenging and computationally demanding process.

The typical way in which lead optimisation (LO) series are represented in the medicinal chemistry literature is as Markush structures and associated R-group tables. The Markush structure shows a central core or molecular scaffold that is common to the series with R groups that indicate the points of variability that have been explored in the series. The associated R-group table shows the substituent

In vitro-based high-throughput screening (HTS) technology is applicable to hazard-based ranking and grouping of diverse agents, including nanomaterials (NMs). We present a standardized HTS-derived human cell-based testing protocol which combines the analysis of five assays into a broad toxic mode-of-action-based hazard value, termed Tox5-score. The overall protocol includes automated data FAIRification

In drug discovery, prioritizing compounds for experimental testing is a critical task that can be optimized through active learning by strategically selecting informative molecules. Active learning typically trains models on labeled examples alone, while unlabeled data is only used for acquisition. This fully supervised approach neglects valuable information present in unlabeled molecular data, impairing

Representing molecules as graphs is a natural approach for capturing their structural information, with atoms depicted as nodes and bonds as edges. Although graph-based similarity calculation approaches, such as the graph edit distance, have been proposed for calculating molecular similarity, these approaches are nondeterministic polynomial (NP)-hard and thus computationally infeasible for routine

Metabolites serve as crucial biomarkers for assessing disease progression and understanding underlying pathogenic mechanisms. However, when the metabolic pathway category of metabolites is unknown, researchers face challenges in conducting metabolomic analyses. Due to the complexity of wet laboratory experimentation for pathway identification, there is a growing demand for predictive methods. Various

Water solubility is a relevant physico-chemcial property in environmental chemistry, toxicology, and drug design. Although the water solubility is besides the octanol–water partition coefficient, melting point, and boiling point a property with a large amount of available experimental data, there are still more compounds in the chemical universe for which information on their water solubility is lacking

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in drug discovery offers promising opportunities to streamline and enhance the traditional drug development process. One core challenge in de novo molecular design is modeling complex structure-activity relationships (SAR), such as activity cliffs, where minor molecular changes yield significant shifts in biological activity. In response to the limitations

Understanding of the structural and dynamic behaviour of molecules is a major objective in molecular modeling research. Sampling through the torsional space is an efficient way to map their behaviour. However, generating a landscape of possible conformations relies on multiple formalisms whose mathematics are often difficult to convert to code. Here we present a command line tool and a scripting module

Spleen tyrosine kinase (Syk) is a crucial mediator of inflammatory processes and a promising therapeutic target for the management of autoimmune disorders, such as immune thrombocytopenia. While several Syk inhibitors are known to date, their efficacy and safety profiles remain suboptimal, necessitating the exploration of novel compounds. The study introduces a novel deep reinforcement learning strategy

In synthesis planning, identifying and optimizing chemical reactions are important for the successful design of synthetic pathways to target substances. Chemical reaction databases assist chemists in gaining insights into this process. Traditionally, searching for relevant records from a reaction database has relied on the manual formulation of queries by chemists based on their search purposes, which

Our study investigates polyphenol-protein interactions, analyzing their structural diversity and dynamic behavior. Analysis of the entire Protein Data Bank reveals diverse polyphenolic structures, engaging in various noncovalent interactions with proteins. Interactions observed across crystal structures among diverse polyphenolic classes reveal similarities, underscoring consistent patterns across

The development of robust artificial intelligence (AI)-driven predictive models relies on high-quality, diverse chemical datasets. However, the scarcity of negative data and a publication bias toward positive results often hinder accurate biological activity prediction. To address this challenge, we introduce InertDB, a comprehensive database comprising 3,205 curated inactive compounds (CICs) identified

Liver toxicity poses a critical challenge in drug development due to the liver's pivotal role in drug metabolism and detoxification. Accurately predicting liver toxicity is crucial but is hindered by scattered information sources, a lack of curation standards, and the heterogeneity of data perspectives. To address these challenges, we developed the HepatoToxicity Portal (HTP), which integrates an expert-curated

It has become impossible to imagine the fields of biochemistry and medicinal chemistry without computational chemistry and molecular modelling techniques. In many steps of the drug development process in silico methods have become indispensable. Virtual screening (VS) can tremendously expedite the early discovery phase, whilst the use of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations forms a powerful additional

Cheminformatics and chemical databases are essential to drug discovery. However, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) methodologies are changing the way in which chemical data is used. How will the use of chemical data change in drug discovery moving forward? How do the new ML methods in molecular property prediction, hit and lead and target identification and structure prediction

The design and optimization of chiral ligands and catalysts are fundamental to advancing asymmetric catalysis, a critical area in organic chemistry with wide-ranging impacts across scientific disciplines. Traditional experimental approaches, while essential, are often hindered by their slow pace and complexity. Recent advancements have demonstrated that computational methods, particularly machine learning

Cheminformatics has significantly transformed over the past four decades, evolving from a field dominated by proprietary systems to one increasingly embracing open science principles. In its early years, cheminformatics was characterised by commercial software and restricted data access, limiting collaboration and reproducibility. The advent of open-source software in the late 1990s and early 2000s

Correction: Journal of Cheminformatics (2025) 17:13 https://doi.org/10.1186/s13321-025-00961-1 Following publication of the original article [1], the authors identified the following errors: The incorrect Acknowledgements is: The authors would like to thank the ‘National Biodiversity Future Center’ (identification code CN00000033, CUP B73C21001300006) on ‘Biodiversity’, financed under the National

In this manuscript we present the strategy for modeling photoswitch properties (maximum absorption wavelength and thermal half-life of photoisomers) of visible-light azo-photoswitches using structural data. We compile a comprehensive data set from literature sources and perform a rigorous benchmark to select the best feature type and modeling approach. The fragment counts have demonstrated the best

Computer-Aided Synthesis Planning (CASP) and CASP-based approximated synthesizability scores have rarely been used as generation objectives in Computer-Aided Drug Design despite facilitating the in-silico generation of synthesizable molecules. However, these synthesizability approaches are disconnected from the reality of small laboratory drug design, where building block resources are limited, thus

Since the inception of the Internet, public databases disseminating chemistry data to the community have proliferated and helped to support and encourage a burgeoning interest in cheminformatics. This has been supported by a shift in open science, exemplified by Open Data, Open Source, and Open Standards (ODOSOS) for chemistry [1], as well as by the increasing sophistication and availability of free

Skin irritation is a significant adverse effect associated with chemicals and drug substances. Quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) is an alternative method bypassing in vivo assay for filling data gaps in chemical risk assessment. In this study, we developed QSAR models based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to classify skin irritation caused by chemical compounds. We utilized chemical

This study investigates the risks of exposing confidential chemical structures when machine learning models trained on these structures are made publicly available. We use membership inference attacks, a common method to assess privacy that is largely unexplored in the context of drug discovery, to examine neural networks for molecular property prediction in a black-box setting. Our results reveal

Aqueous solubility (AS) is a key physiochemical property that plays a crucial role in drug discovery and material design. We report a novel unified approach to predict and infer chemical compounds with the desired AS based on simple deterministic graph-theoretic descriptors, multiple linear regression (MLR), and mixed integer linear programming (MILP). Selected descriptors based on a forward stepwise

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI)-based molecular design methodologies have offered synthetic chemists new ways to design functional molecules with their desired properties. While various AI-based molecule generators have significantly advanced toward practical applications, their effective use still requires specialized knowledge and skills concerning AI techniques. Here, we develop

Protein–protein interactions (PPIs) are central to the mechanisms of signaling pathways and immune responses, which can help us understand disease etiology. Therefore, there is a significant need for efficient and rapid automated approaches to predict changes in PPIs. In recent years, there has been a significant increase in applying deep learning techniques to predict changes in binding affinity between

The quest to predict and understand protein evolution has been hindered by limitations on both the theoretical and the experimental fronts. Most existing theoretical models of evolution are descriptive, rather than predictive, leaving the final modifications in the hands of researchers. Existing experimental techniques to help probe the evolutionary sequence space of proteins, such as directed evolution