Exploratory Chemoinformatic Analysis of Cell Type-Selective Anticancer Drug Targeting

Chemical address tags of fluorescent bioimaging probes

Chemical address tags can be defined as specific structural features shared by a set of bioimaging probes having a predictable influence on cell-associated visual signals obtained from these probes. Here, using a large image dataset acquired with a high content screening instrument, machine vision and cheminformatics analysis have been applied to reveal chemical address tags. With a combinatorial library of fluorescent molecules, fluorescence signal intensity, spectral, and spatial features characterizing each one of the probes' visual signals were extracted from images acquired with the three different excitation and emission channels of the imaging instrument. With multivariate regression, the additive contribution from each one of the different building blocks of the bioimaging probes toward each measured, cell-associated image-based feature was calculated. In this manner, variations in the chemical features of the molecules were associated with the resulting staining patterns, facilitating quantitative, objective analysis of chemical address tags. Hierarchical clustering and paired image-cheminformatics analysis revealed key structure-property relationships amongst many building blocks of the fluorescent molecules. The results point to different chemical modifications of the bioimaging probes that can exert similar (or different) effects on the probes' visual signals. Inspection of the clustered structures suggests intramolecular charge migration or partial charge distribution as potential mechanistic determinants of chemical address tag behavior.

A Cheminformatic Toolkit for Mining Biomedical Knowledge

PURPOSE

Cheminformatics can be broadly defined to encompass any activity related to the application of information technology to the study of properties, effects and uses of chemical agents. One of the most important current challenges in cheminformatics is to allow researchers to search databases of biomedical knowledge, using chemical structures as input.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

An important step towards this goal was the establishment of PubChem, an open, centralized database of small molecules accessible through the World Wide Web. While PubChem is primarily intended to serve as a repository for high throughput screening data from federally-funded screening centers and academic research laboratories, the major impact of PubChem could also reside in its ability to serve as a chemical gateway to biomedical databases such as PubMed.

CONCLUSION

This article will review cheminformatic tools that can be applied to facilitate annotation of PubChem through links to the scientific literature; to integrate PubChem with transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic datasets; to incorporate results of numerical simulations of physiological systems into PubChem annotation; and ultimately, to translate data of chemical genomics screening efforts into information that will benefit biomedical researchers and physician scientists across all therapeutic areas.