Diversity
Chimie combinatoire

As we saw at the beginning of this article, combinatorial chemistry can produce thousands of molecules in a very short space of time. Since all combinations of large families of monomers are a priori possible, the question is to choose wisely which compounds to synthesize. The gigantic sizes of the first mixed peptide libraries (several tens of millions of compounds) showed that it was not enough to make a large number of molecules to find drug candidates. These libraries suffered from a lack of diversity.

The diversity of a set of molecules is calculated by comparing the properties of each of them, these properties most often being the nature of the functional groups and their respective positions. While diversity is easy to assess on a small set of compounds, the problem is difficult to manage on the scale of combinatorial chemistry, which requires the comparison of lists containing thousands...