Glossary v1.0

There has been some requests for a glossary/thesaurus especially for the newbies.

I promise you this is not a complete list, nor will it be necessarily alphabetical.

Abbott: Pharmaceutical company considered to be the pioneers of Fragment-based Drug Discovery
CADD: Computer-aided Drug Design. This is a "design" vs. a "discovery" method.
FBDD: Fragment-based Drug Discovery. An ExecDir I knew preferred Discovery over Design for odd reasons, which in typical fashion I forget here.
FBLD: Fragment-based Ligand Discovery. This actually makes more sense, because we are looking for ligands to targets, which eventually will be turned into to drugs. This is to create more of a contrast to standard HTS (see below) which screens for drugs.
Fragment: A chemical structure smaller than the final drug.
IP: Intellectual Property, as in there is none for fragments (That's for you David.)
ITC: Isothermal Calorimetry. Proof that you really needed to take that thermodynamics course in college, and you probably should have taken one in grad school.
Ligand: Chemical moiety that binds (or mostly doesn't bind to target).
NMR: Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy Method which uses the quantum nature of nuclear spins to generate data on the binding and structure of ligands and target.
SBDD: Structure-based Drug Design. I think this is more acceptable to say "drug design" because of inherent use of CADD. There have been more Nobel Prizes for NMR than X-ray.
SPR: Surface Plasmon Resonance, a.k.a BiaCore. Although this is more Xerox than anything else. The method is SPR, the maker of the machines is BiaCore, now a wholly owned subsidiary of GE Healthcare. Of course, just like Xerox and copy machines, there are other manufacturers of SPR equipment.
Target: That to which one wishes to bind a ligand to modulate some biochemical activity in order to achieve a pharmaceutical effect, hopefully with clearly defined IP. Targets can be proteins, nucleic acids, or any other biological entity.
X-ray Crystallography: Method which uses the wave-particle duality of atoms to generate data on the binding and structure of ligands.