Toward a 3D Search Engine

Plasma Droid writes "NewScientistTech has a story about a 3D molecular search engine that is over 1,500 times faster than anything previously developed. The researchers, from Oxford University, developed a lightning-fast way to quickly match 3D shapes mathematically. This could not only speed up searches for new drugs, but lead to 3D search engines, for finding objects uploaded to platforms such as Google Earth, they say." The problem will be in jump-starting the supply of 3D data about molecules and everything else.

Comments

Shape versus negative space

[goombah99]

It's pretty easy to geometrically hash or construct reduced feature vectors for matching. People (like me) have been doing this for years. It's much harder to know if a molecule will fit into a crevice or negative space. THe latter is probably more important to drug design. the reduced feature vectors let you know quickly if two molecules are simmmilar in shape. Which is the title given to the article. But then this is discussed in the context of drug targets. A harder problem. What maybe new or clever here is that they found a very useful set of feature vectors.