Compressed binary bit trees: a new data structure for accelerating database searching.

Molecules are often represented as bit string fingerprints in databases. These bit strings are used for similarity searching using the Tanimoto coefficient and rapid indexing. A new data structure is introduced, the compressed bit binary tree, that rapidly increases search and indexing times by up to a factor of 30. Results will be shown for databases of up to 1 M compounds with a variety of search parameters.