Adding a little culture to the chemical laboratory could help chemists find structures much faster than before. According to UK chemists, Samantha Chong and Maryjane Tremayne, of the University of Birmingham, combining the principles of social and biological evolution with a little fashion sense to make a new Cultural Differential Evolution algorithm allowed them to half the time it took to solve the structure of a molecule from its powder diffraction data.
Their research could have widespread application in solving a variety of global optimization problems in chemistry, nanoscience and bioinformatics.
The use of evolutionary algorithms is a relatively new approach to solving problems based on mimicking the principles of “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest”. The Birmingham team reasoned that the much more rapid social evolution experienced by humans, essentially fashion sense, could be merged into an evolutionary algorithm to help reduce the number of likely candidates for a particular structure much more quickly. They have now demonstrated how this works on two compounds, a previously unsolved structure and baicalein, the active ingredient in the Asian herbal medicine “Sho-saiko-to”.
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