One Fragment to Rule them All

Recently, I have been riffing on the ontology of FBDD.  FBDD has become so popular that we are now seeing appropriation of the term in many papers that don't really mean it.  So, I came across this paper.  Now, don't be fooled by the title, this is about fragments, the abstract promises me so.  Let me skip the science, which to my eyes is actually quite boring, and get right to the heart of their fragment case.  

How is this paper fragments you ask?  Well, this is not about scaffold hopping or innovative uses of fragments to develop SAR.  This is not about interesting approaches to screening.  It is most certainly not about in silico approaches.  This is most certainly about fragment library design.  We often discuss here the sizes of fragment libraries and what they should look like.  One important concept we often tackle here is how big should the libraries be and what size should fragments be.  More importantly we often discuss how much of chemical space a fragment library should cover.  This paper takes an anti-Reymond approach to address that question. 

The Reymond approach tries to determine how big chemical space is, what it looks like, and what portion of it is available.  The Anti-Reymond approach identifies what is available and validates its inclusion in a fragment library.  Here is the last sentence of this paper:

"These findings...verify the value of the benzamide fragment in drug design."

Now, I was worried that benzamidine was not a valuable fragment.  This paper has removed all doubt in my mind.  Now that is settled, we can go on an validate the other 165, 999, 999,999 other possible fragments.