Two students in Denis Fourches’ Cheminformatics lab recently received highly competitive ACS CINF awards at the American Chemical Society ACS National Meeting in Washington,DC.
Phyo Phyo Kyaw Zin presented her most recent work on the development of the PKS enumerator, a software to generate large libraries of macrocycles with user-defined constrains (she showcased a dataset of 10 million compounds). This work is done in close collaboration with Dr. Gavin Williams (Chemistry, NCSU) and has applications for the virtual screening of new bioactive macrolides for the development of new antimicrobials and agrochemicals.
Jeremy Ash presented his work on the first study using cheminformatics for the analysis and modeling of metabolomics data. The technique allows for a better identification of individual and groups of small molecule metabolites that can discriminate cancer patients versus healthy individuals. This is relevant for the development of disease biomarkers and precision medicine.