Chemomics and drug innovation

Chemomics is an interdisciplinary study using approaches from chemoinformatics, bioinformatics, synthetic chemistry, and other related disciplines. Biological systems make natural products from endogenous small molecules (natural product building blocks) through a sequence of enzyme catalytic reactions. For each reaction, the natural product building blocks may contribute a group of atoms to the target natural product. We describe this group of atoms as a chemoyl. A chemome is the complete set of chemoyls in an organism. Chemomics studies chemomes and the principles of natural product syntheses and evolutions. Driven by survival and reproductive demands, biological systems have developed effective protocols to synthesize natural products in order to respond to environmental changes; this results in biological and chemical diversity. In recent years, it has been realized that one of the bottlenecks in drug discovery is the lack of chemical resources for drug screening. Chemomics may solve this problem by revealing the rules governing the creation of chemical diversity in biological systems, and by developing biomimetic synthesis approaches to make quasi natural product libraries for drug screening. This treatise introduces chemomics and outlines its contents and potential applications in the fields of drug innovation.