You signed in with another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You signed out in another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You switched accounts on another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.Dismiss alert
4.2 Bond Primitives
Various bond symbols are available to match connections between atoms. A missing bond symbol is interpreted as "single or aromatic".
In practice, most tools don't really honor this daylight convention, per se. And that's mostly okay. By a strict reading of the Daylight resource a SMARTS query of c1ccccc1 (benzene) would actually be interpreted as having single-or-aromatic bonds between each atom with each atom itself having at least one aromatic bond somewhere. This is impractical to specify in a molfile.
Typically when a tool produces a SMARTS/SMILES pattern with aromatic atoms (e.g. c) but non-specific bonds between those aromatic atoms (e.g. cc), the common interpretation is that the unspecified bond is aromatic (e.g. c:c). Similarly, when a tool produces a SMARTS/SMILES pattern with aliphatic atoms (e.g. C), but a non-specific bond (e.g. CC), the common interpretation is an implied single bond (e.g. C-C). These conventions are widely used even if they present some problems.
The compromise solution requires a modification to Daylight's statement:
A missing bond symbol BETWEEN ATOMS WHERE AT LEAST ONE ATOM HAS A QUERY FEATURE is interpreted as "single or aromatic".
That is, it's fine to have explicit non-query atoms imply the bonds between them. But if at least one atom is a query atom, AND the SMARTS pattern does not specify a bond type, it should get interpreted as single-or-aromatic. For example:
From Daylight's SMARTS page:
https://www.daylight.com/dayhtml/doc/theory/theory.smarts.html
In practice, most tools don't really honor this daylight convention, per se. And that's mostly okay. By a strict reading of the Daylight resource a SMARTS query of
c1ccccc1
(benzene) would actually be interpreted as having single-or-aromatic bonds between each atom with each atom itself having at least one aromatic bond somewhere. This is impractical to specify in a molfile.Typically when a tool produces a SMARTS/SMILES pattern with aromatic atoms (e.g.
c
) but non-specific bonds between those aromatic atoms (e.g.cc
), the common interpretation is that the unspecified bond is aromatic (e.g.c:c
). Similarly, when a tool produces a SMARTS/SMILES pattern with aliphatic atoms (e.g.C
), but a non-specific bond (e.g.CC
), the common interpretation is an implied single bond (e.g.C-C
). These conventions are widely used even if they present some problems.The compromise solution requires a modification to Daylight's statement:
That is, it's fine to have explicit non-query atoms imply the bonds between them. But if at least one atom is a query atom, AND the SMARTS pattern does not specify a bond type, it should get interpreted as single-or-aromatic. For example:
Here a "query atom" is any atom specified as an atom list (including a list of 1 element) or an atom wildcard.
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: