Practical Fragments

Last week we wrote about the magical properties chlorine can impart to molecules. More generally, halogen atoms can be helpful for a variet...

More than a decade ago we highlighted a paper that discussed “magic methyl” groups, which can boost the affinity of a ligand for a protein ...

The caspase family of cysteine proteases is critical for initiating and executing programmed cell death, and some members also play a role ...

With all the attention on COVID-19 over the past few years, it’s easy to forget about bacteria. But they haven’t forgotten about us. Indeed,...

The Royal Society of Chemistry puts out RSC Med. Chem. , and last year they asked David Rees (Astex), Anna Hirsch (Helmholtz Institute for P...

Last week the CHI Drug Discovery Chemistry ( DDC ) meeting was held in San Diego, and it was the largest ever, with more than 850 participan...

The quality of a fragment hit depends on the quality of the library. Virtual screens can be done with billions of compounds, but if you’re ...

Practical Fragments has always been free and worth every penny. But over the past 15 years and 900+ posts we believe we've generated a ...

Of the roughly 150,000 crystal structures in the Protein Data Bank ( PDB ), about 94% were collected at cryogenic temperatures (≤ 200 K), ty...

Four years ago we highlighted an analysis of fragments taken from the Protein Data Bank ( PDB ). Of 462 unique fragments, just 21 bound in ...

Last week’s post highlighted an example of fragment linking, which despite being less common than fragment growing can still be effective ....

Last week’s post focused on fragment screening against RNA, and we continue the theme this week with a paper published in Proc. Nat. Acad....

Fragment-based lead discovery against RNA has been a theme on Practical Fragments for well over a decade. Unfortunately, most of the result...

The last two Practical Fragments posts focused on bromodomains, epigenetic readers that recognize acetylated lysine residues. Today’s post...

Last week we highlighted the discovery of a selective inhibitor for the BET family of bromodomains. The 61 human bromodomains fall into eig...

The metrics ligand efficiency ( LE ) and lipophilic ligand efficiency (LLE or LipE ) are frequently used during fragment-to-lead optimizati...

Just over seven years ago Practical Fragments highlighted work out of Merck describing the discovery and optimization of potent, selective ...

Back in 2015, Practical Fragments highlighted a new resource calling itself “ The Chemical Probes Portal .” At the time it included just s...