Pharmacophore in drug discovery
What is Pharmacophore? A Pharmacophore is an ensemble of steric, electrostatic and hydrophobic properties which is essential for optimal supramolecular interactions with a biolocial receptor, to modulate or inhibit a biological effect. A Pharmacophore does not represent a concrete molecule, but an abstract concept which describes the common molecular properties of interaction with the receptor. The Pharmacophore anchors the agent with the receptor. With pharmacophoric models one can define special properties (pharmacophoric points) based on the structure of the receptor or based on the structure of a known agent. This pharmacophoric points can be checked against a database of pharmacophores. Pharmacophore approaches have become one of the major tools in drug discovery after the past century's development. Various ligand-based and structure-based methods have been developed for improved pharmacophore modeling and have been successfully and exte...