The screening of chemical libraries is an important step in the drug discovery process. The existing chemical libraries contain up to millions of compounds. As the screening at such scale is expensive, the virtual screening is often utilized. There exist several variants of virtual screening and ligand-based virtual screening is one of them. It utilizes the similarity of screened chemical compo...

Virtual screening is being routinely used as an integral part of today's hit-identification strategies for, on one hand, prioritizing large corporate screening collections and, on the other hand, to extend the scope of screening to external databases. A brief description of the essential elements required for virtual screening and an application example to the identification of agonist hits for...

Many of the similarity-based virtual screening approaches assume that molecular fragments that are not related to the biological activity carry the same weight as the important ones. This was the reason that led to the use of Bayesian networks as an alternative to existing tools for similarity-based virtual screening. In our recent work, the retrieval performance of the Bayesian inference netwo...

Ligand-based virtual screening of large small-molecule databases is an important step in the early stages of drug development. It is based on the similarity principle and is used to reduce the chemical space of large databases to a manageable size where chosen ligands can be experimentally tested. Ligand-based virtual screening can also be used to identify bioactive molecules with different bas...