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

Impact on Pharma (esp. patents)

[Mateo_LeFou]

I've always been of two minds about whether the drug industry was a good example of patents being cost-effective, because I suspect that very good technology will soon emerge that makes pharma R&D less expensive, by making it primarily a data-processing (esp. simulation) issue. Seems like this tech might be the first piece of that puzzle?

Good, but just one tiny bit of the problem

[filthWisard]

This is a really cool advance when working with molecules you already know the shape of, but it still doesn't get around the problem of what shape a molecule is in the first place. A protein molecule will naturally collapse into the shape with the lowest energy. If there are 100 atoms in the main chain, that's 99 different angles that it could have, that's 99 degrees of freedom. I hear that genetic algorithms are pretty good at finding the most lightly shape though, so this may not be as big a problem as it used to be.