Data mining of protein-binding profiling data identifies structural modifications that distinguish selective and promiscuous compounds.

Activity profiling of compound collections across multiple targets is increasingly being used in probe and drug discovery. Herein, we discuss an approach to systematically analyzing the structure-activity relationships of a large screening profile data with emphasis on identifying structural changes that have a significant impact on the number of proteins to which a compound binds. As a case study, we analyzed a recently released public data set of more than 15 000 compounds screened across 100 sequence-unrelated proteins. The screened compounds have different origins and include natural products, synthetic molecules from academic groups, and commercial compounds. Similar synthetic structures from academic groups showed, overall, greater promiscuity differences than do natural products and commercial compounds. The method implemented in this work readily identified structural changes that differentiated highly specific from promiscuous compounds. This approach is general and can be applied to analyze any other large-scale protein-binding profile data.