Bioinformatics for Medicinal Chemistry

Abstract

Bioinformatics is the computational processing and analysis of biological data. Structured biological data is available in open-access databases and provides a valuable source of information for drug discovery and medicinal chemistry research. In this chapter, an overview of key biological entities, their properties and databases relevant to bioinformatics analyses is presented. Medicinal chemistry resources (that also use chemoinformatics approaches) are described and we offer an insight into how these can be used to investigate the impact of chemical entities on biological molecules relevant to disease. Platforms that integrate broad drug-relevant data in a user-friendly format are also highlighted. Throughout the chapter, the example of cholesterol lowering drugs and/or their biological targets are used to highlight bioinformatics strategies and relevant data that can be extracted from freely available data repositories to illustrate how bioinformatics can be of use to the medicinal chemistry community.