Cheminformatics aspects of high throughput screening: from robots to models: symposium summary

The “Cheminformatics aspects of high throughput screening (HTS): from robots to models” symposium was part of the computers in chemistry technical program at the American Chemical Society National Meeting in Denver, Colorado during the fall of 2011. This symposium brought together researchers from high throughput screening centers and molecular modelers from academia and industry to discuss the integration of currently available high throughput screening data and assays with computational analysis. The topics discussed at this symposium covered the data-infrastructure at various academic, hospital, and National Institutes of Health-funded high throughput screening centers, the cheminformatics and molecular modeling methods used in real world examples to guide screening and hit-finding, and how academic and non-profit organizations can benefit from current high throughput screening cheminformatics resources. Specifically, this article also covers the remarks and discussions in the open panel discussion of the symposium and summarizes the following talks on “Accurate Kinase virtual screening: biochemical, cellular and selectivity”, “Selective, privileged and promiscuous chemical patterns in high-throughput screening” and “Visualizing and exploring relationships among HTS hits using network graphs”.