Similarity Searches.

Similarity Searches. A common activity in biopharmaceutical companies is the search for drug analogues. Starting with a promising drug molecule, one can search for chemical compounds with similar structure or properties to a known compound. There are a variety of methods used in these searches, including sequence similarity, 2D and 3D shape similarity, substructure similarity, electrostatic similarity and others. A variety of bioinformatic tools and search engines are available for this work.