LigandScout

LigandScout is computer software that allows creating three-dimensional (3D) pharmacophore models from structural data of macromolecule–ligand complexes, or from training and test sets of organic molecules. It incorporates a complete definition of 3D chemical features (such as hydrogen bond donors, acceptors, lipophilic areas, positively and negatively ionizable chemical groups) that describe the interaction of a bound small organic molecule (ligand) and the surrounding binding site of the macromolecule.^[1] These pharmacophores can be overlaid and superimposed using a pattern-matching based alignment algorithm^[2] that is solely based on pharmacophoric feature points instead of chemical structure. From such an overlay, shared features can be interpolated to create a so-called shared-feature pharmacophore that shares all common interactions of several binding sites/ligands or extended to create a so-called merged-feature pharmacophore. The software has been successfully used to predict new lead structures in drug design, e.g., predicting biological activity of novel human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) reverse transcriptase inhibitors.^[3]