Practical Fragments

Small is becoming big. Five years ago we highlighted MiniFrags, consisting of just 5-7 non-hydrogen atoms; FragLites and MicroFrags soon ...

Practical Fragments has written frequently about hot spots , regions on proteins that are predisposed to bind ligands such as drugs. Determ...

Practical Fragments has written several times about “ hot spots ”: regions on proteins where small molecules and fragments readily bind. Kn...

Scientists generally want structural information when a project begins, and ideally that structural information comes from crystallography....

NMR is among the more sensitive fragment-finding techniques: the starting point for clinical compound ASTX660 had low millimolar affinity ...

Several recent Practical Fragments posts have touched on crystallographic screening : from ultra-high concentration screening of “ MiniFra...

Screening fragments crystallographically is becoming more  common , especially as the process becomes increasingly automated . Not only doe...

A couple years ago we highlighted a paper from Eddy Arnold’s group at Rutgers University in which crystallographic fragment screening reve...

Anyone who has been exposed to much crystallography will have seen examples where a ligand binds somewhere besides the active site of a pro...

The three members of the Pim family of serine/threonine kinases help cancer cells proliferate and survive, and are thus interesting as poten...

Hot spots are regions of a protein with a particular predilection for binding to small molecules – thermodynamic sinkholes, so to speak. Dis...

Although most people try to advance fragments to more potent molecules, some have taken the reverse approach: starting with potent binders a...