How to Connect a Chemical Structure to a Property: History and new developments
Résumé
Organic chemistry has based its knowledge on the study of structures of chemical elements and their reactivity. The classification of the various elements, atoms and molecules has evolved over time, but it is remarkable that these representations have incorporated such subjective quality concepts in connection with the perceptions that the manipulators of these substances could identify. The electronic properties of atoms connected to the nuclear behavior of these elements indeed provide each element’s periodic classification. Thanks to this classification model, it was possible to envisage the existence of elements as yet not isolated. This theorization of the structure of matter by Schrödinger has opened the way to purely theoretical modeling which is in itself the basis of the in silico chemistry. But how do we link these structures to physico-chemical or biological properties? This question, which has been perplexing and uniting chemists, physicists, biologists, and mathematicians alike for more than 150 years, has given rise to molecular-level knowledge of recognition mechanisms for complementary structures and the design of new, innovative targeted drugs. With the development of quantitative structure property relationships (QSAR) models, chemists are closer than ever to understanding the paradigm of the universality of such structure models. How might one ensure that only one molecular structure is responsible for one particular property? Answering such a question could allow further development in the representation of molecular structures.
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