CHORTLES: a method for representing oligomeric and template-based mixtures.

Screening mixtures of synthetic oligomers or fixed templates (e.g., rings) with varying substituents is increasingly the focus of drug discovery programs. CHORTLES is designed and implemented to facilitate representation, storage, and searching of oligomeric and template-based mixtures of any size. Building upon the CHUCKLES method of representing oligomers as both monomer-based sequences and all-atom structures, CHORTLES compactly represents a mixture without explicitly enumerating individual molecules. This method lends itself to a hierarchy relating mixtures to submixtures and individual compounds, as one finds when deconvoluting mixtures in drug lead discovery programs. In addition, we describe two methods of searching mixtures at the monomer level. We also present a simple pictorial representation for describing all components in a mixture, which becomes essential as the list of monomer names is expanded beyond common names (e.g., amino acids).