Libraries for HTS: Privileged Structures in Sparsely Populated Chemical Space

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Highly diverse compound libraries consisting of under-explored chemotypes will be provided to the NIH for screening in the NIH Molecular Library Screening Center Network (MLSCN). The central hypothesis of this application is that compound libraries, which contain novel chemotypes, incorporate privileged structures, and cover largely unexplored diversity space, will provide new tools to study the functions of genes, signaling pathways, and other complex biological systems. The libraries incorporate activity-enhancing features such as privileged structures and others, known to be important for interactions with macromolecular structures. The libraries are therefore expected to have high hit rates in biological assays. The libraries have been designed to provide diverse chemotypes as judged by their diversity scores. The diversity scores were derived from analysis against the NIH PubChem database and demonstrate that the proposed scaffolds populate sparsely populated diversity space. Only compounds from sparsely and moderately populated chemical space possessing adequate solubility will be selected for synthesis in this project. Five subprojects are proposed that offer varied chemotypes: (1) Synthesis of libraries with nitrogen-containing cyclic scaffolds;(2) Design and synthesis of factorial libraries from privileged structures;(3) Novel medium-ring size combinatorial libraries;(4) Diversity-oriented library synthesis;(5) Natural product-derived libraries.