Summary

Construction of high-quality fragment libraries by segmenting organic compounds is an important part of the drug discovery paradigm. This article presents a new method, MacFrag, for efficient molecule fragmentation. MacFrag utilized a modified version of BRICS rules to break chemical bonds and introduced an efficient subgraphs extraction algorithm for rapid enumeration of the fragment space. The evaluation results with ChEMBL dataset exhibited that MacFrag was overall faster than BRICS implemented in RDKit and modified molBLOCKS. Meanwhile, the fragments acquired through MacFrag were more compliant with the ‘Rule of Three’.

Availability and implementation

https://github.com/yydiao1025/MacFrag.

Supplementary information

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.