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Matching structures of a series of docked ligand also give clues on the nature of pharmacophore where these ligands bind with. The ligand of the best biological activity measured is usually selected as a template where the structures of all the others are superimposed on it one by one. The task is simple if the difference in structural features between these molecules is not wide.
Tools for finding the molecular similarity in terms of Gaussian molecular shapes computed for a series of molecules are also under developing. Since ligands interact with their binding sites through their molecular fields, we simply superpose the docked conformations of two ligands to reveal some pharmacophore features. The figure beside shows that some pharmacophore features (green circles) are revealed by such a superposition.