Practical Fragments

Compound purification can be a major hassle: separating the desired product from starting materials, reagents, and byproducts often takes f...

Earlier this year we highlighted a paper from Novartis in which ligand deconstruction was used to deconstruct an HTS hit against the epige...

Sir James Black famously said that the best way to find a new drug is to start with an existing one. A drug not only has to bind to a targe...

Practical Fragments has had quite a few posts on ligand efficiency (see here , here , and here , for starters). Ligand efficiency (LE) is ...

Computational screening continues to improve, due in part to a better understanding of the energetics of protein-ligand interactions. But ...

Last September we highlighted two papers out of Novartis in which various fragment-based methods delivered two separate series of low nano...

Among fragment-linking approaches, protein-templated reactions have a special appeal. When two fragments that bind next to one another on a...

Bromodomains , a type of functional module within proteins, recognize acetylated lysine residues in other proteins to act as epigenetic “re...

Elaborating a fragment to improve its affinity relies on the assumption that the fragment will maintain its position and orientation during...

Molecular complexity is a fundamental concept underlying fragment-based lead discovery: fragments, being simple, can bind to more sites on...

Last year we highlighted work out of Ben Cravatt’s group at Scripps on screening covalent fragments in cells. Now, in a new Cell   paper ,...

Long-time readers will know that I have a peculiar fascination  for  artifacts of all kinds , particularly when they provide learning opp...

Ligand deconstruction is a strategy for early-stage drug discovery in which a known hit is dissected into component fragments and one or m...

According to our last poll , ligand-detected NMR is the most popular method for finding fragments. And among the several ligand-detected NM...

The relative importance of enthalpy versus entropy for protein-ligand interactions has been a subject of considerable attention. In a 2009 ...

Teddy’s retirement from the blog has cut down on the number of PAINS-shaming posts , and truth be told there are so many candidate papers ...

Of all the fragment-derived drugs in the clinic, perhaps none is so closely watched as verubecestat (MK-8931), Merck’s BACE1 inhibitor in...

What better way to start the year than with a list of upcoming conferences? Here's what we know about so far. March 5-7:  The UK may h...

This year is finally coming to an end, and as we've done for the past four years , Practical Fragments will highlight some of the r...