Molecular shape and electrostatics in the encoding of relevant chemical information.

We propose a molecule's chemistry can be hidden by representations of its shape and electrostatic field while retaining crucial, pharmaceutically relevant, information. Necessary, but not sufficient, to this proposition are the importance of shape and electrostatics to activity, the facility to easily represent, store and compare field properties, and knowledge of the density of possible drug-like molecules within a given radius of physical similarity. We provide methods and evidence to support the conclusion that a useful encoding is practical and propose tests for falsification.