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Updated: Mar 15, 2026

Spatial Separation of Molecular Conformers and Clusters
Published on: January 9, 2014
Chemical space visualization: transforming multidimensional chemical spaces into similarity-based molecular networks
Antonio de la Vega de León1, Jürgen Bajorath1
1Department of Life Science Informatics, B-IT, LIMES Program Unit Chemical Biology & Medicinal Chemistry, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Dahlmannstr. 2, D-53113 Bonn, Germany.
Background:
The concept of chemical space is of fundamental relevance for medicinal chemistry and chemical informatics. Multidimensional chemical space representations are coordinate-based. Chemical space networks (CSNs) have been introduced as a coordinate-free representation.
Results:
A computational approach is presented for the transformation of multidimensional chemical space into CSNs. The design of transformation CSNs (TRANS-CSNs) is based upon a similarity function that directly reflects distance relationships in original multidimensional space.
Conclusion:
TRANS-CSNs provide an immediate visualization of coordinate-based chemical space and do not require the use of dimensionality reduction techniques. At low network density, TRANS-CSNs are readily interpretable and make it possible to evaluate structure-activity relationship information originating from multidimensional chemical space.
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