Organic synthesis is often heralded as more art than science. An organic chemist’s eye for complexity, breaking down structures into simpler forms, is honed and nurtured over decades. But, is it possible to take this seemingly intangible skill and quantify it, putting a simple number on how complex a chemical structure actually is?
Process chemists Martin Eastgate and Jun Li, at Bristol-Myers Squibb (B-MS) in the US have developed a tool to do just that, generating a unique index they have termed a molecule’s ‘current complexity’, which also accounts for changes over time due to the impact of new technologies.
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Read the original Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry article – it’s free to access until 2nd July:
Current complexity: a tool for assessing the complexity of organic molecules
Jun Lia and Martin D. Eastgate
Org. Biomol. Chem., 2015, DOI: 10.1039/C5OB00709G
