Computer-Assisted Retrosynthesis Based on Molecular Similarity

We demonstrate molecular similarity to be a surprisingly effective metric for proposing and ranking one-step retrosynthetic disconnections based on analogy to precedent reactions. The developed approach mimics the retrosynthetic strategy defined implicitly by a corpus of known reactions without the...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Coley, Connor Wilson, Rogers, Luke, Green Jr, William H, Jensen, Klavs F
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemical Engineering
Format: Article
Published: American Chemical Society (ACS) 2018
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/117536
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8271-8723
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2603-9694
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7192-580X
Description
Summary:We demonstrate molecular similarity to be a surprisingly effective metric for proposing and ranking one-step retrosynthetic disconnections based on analogy to precedent reactions. The developed approach mimics the retrosynthetic strategy defined implicitly by a corpus of known reactions without the need to encode any chemical knowledge. Using 40 000 reactions from the patent literature as a knowledge base, the recorded reactants are among the top 10 proposed precursors in 74.1% of 5000 test reactions, providing strong quantitative support for our methodology. Extension of the one-step strategy to multistep pathway planning is demonstrated and discussed for two exemplary drug products.