Automatic reaction mapping and reaction center detection

A reaction center is the part of a chemical reaction that undergoes changes, the heart of the chemical reaction. The reaction atom-atom mapping indicates which reactant atom becomes which product atom during the reaction. Automatic reaction mapping and reaction center detection are of great importance in many applications, such as developing chemical and biochemical reaction databases and studying reaction mechanisms. Traditional reaction mapping algorithms are either based on extended-connectivity or maximum common substructure (MCS) algorithms. With the development of several biochemical reaction databases (such as KEGG database) and increasing interest in studying metabolic pathways in recent years, several novel reaction mapping algorithms have been developed to serve the new needs. Most of the new algorithms are optimization based, designed to find optimal mappings with the minimum number of broken and formed bonds. Some algorithms also incorporate the chemical knowledge into the searching process in the form of bond weights. Some new algorithms showed better accuracy and performance than the MCS-based method. (C) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.