CONTROLLED PRODUCTION OF PROLIFERATING SOMATIC CELL HYBRIDS

The techniques described permit the controlled production of large numbers of proliferating somatic cell hybrids in a relatively short period of time. Sendai virus is used to promote cell hybridization. β-propriolactone is employed as the inactivating agent of Sendai virus since it produces complete loss of viral infectivity while preserving viral fusion capacity. Cells are fused in monolayer, instead of in suspension, since fixing cells in two dimensions permits one to control cell contacts during the fusion event through the expedient of varying multiplicities of the parental cells and the total cell density. Under the conditions described, a several hundred fold increase in the number of hybrid clones obtained is seen as compared to the controls

Automatic generation of alignments for 3D QSAR analyses

Many 3D QSAR methods require the alignment of the molecules in a dataset, which can require a fair amount of manual effort in deciding upon a rational basis for the superposition. This paper describes the use of FBSS, a pro-ram for field-based similarity searching in chemical databases, for generating such alignments automatically. The CoMFA and CoMSIA experiments with several literature datasets show that the QSAR models resulting from the FBSS alignments are broadly comparable in predictive performance with the models resulting from manual alignments

Ligand-based virtual screening using binary kernel discrimination

This paper discusses the use of a machine-learning technique called binary kernel discrimination (BKD) for virtual screening in drug- and pesticide-discovery programmes. BKD is compared with several other ligand-based tools for virtual screening in databases of 2D structures represented by fragment bit-strings, and is shown to provide an effective, and reasonably efficient, way of prioritising compounds for biological screening