Strategies for 3D pharmacophore-based virtual screening

3D pharmacophore-based techniques have become one of the most important approaches for the fast and accurate virtual screening of databases with millions of compounds. The success of 3D pharmacophores is largely based on their intuitive interpretation and creation, but the virtual screening with such three-dimensional geometric models still poses a considerable algorithmic and conceptual challenge. Most current implementations favor fast screening speed at the detriment of accuracy. This review describes the general strategies and algorithms employed for 3D pharmacophore searching by some current pharmacophore modeling platforms and will highlight their differences.