Practical Fragments

Two years ago today, Practical Fragment$ launched  a line of non-fungible tokens. Unfortunately, the NFT craze didn't last much longer t...

Membrane proteins make up roughly a quarter of human proteins, including many important drug targets. Biophysical methods for fragment scree...

Cancer cells are known for growing and multiplying quickly, and to do so they need to produce large amounts of protein. The rate determining...

With increased throughput and reliability of biophysical and other methods , finding fragments against most targets is now fast and easy. Ad...

NMR is the most venerable approach for finding fragments, and ligand-detected NMR is still among the more popular methods. But the amount o...

The twin rise of make-on-demand libraries and speedy in silico docking has supercharged fragment screening and optimization: we’ve written p...

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is a particularly nasty type of brain tumor with few drug options aside from the DNA alkylating agent temozolo...

In 2009 we highlighted a paper reporting that approved drugs have a higher fraction of sp 3 -hybridized carbon atoms than discovery-phase c...

As we noted just last week, crystallography has unleashed a torrent of protein-ligand complexes, especially fragments. Historically a singl...

As the title states, this is the 1000 th post at Practical Fragments . This blog was conceived in 2008 over drinks at the Third Annual CHI ...

E3 ligase proteins conjugate ubiquitin to other proteins, changing their function or targeting them for degradation. Hijacking E3 ligases us...

At the end of 2023 I mentioned that a paper by Dean Brown listed berotralstat as a fragment-derived drug. Readers will notice this molecule...

After a bumper year for conferences in 2024, this year is also shaping up to be eventful.  April 14-17:  CHI’s Twentieth Annual  Fragment-Ba...

Long winter is here in the global north, with its dim days and gaping nights. As is tradition , Practical Fragments looks back on the year ...

Last week we highlighted the construction of a covalent fragment library at AstraZeneca. The first fruits of this library have recently bee...