In 2000, Roberto Todeschini and Viviana Consonni wrote the highly valuable
Handbook of Molecular Descriptors, part of our series ‘‘Methods and Principles in
Medicinal Chemistry.’’ This volume achieved high acceptance among researchers in
the field of drug discovery and design. Now, eight years later, the significant
developments in the area of molecular descriptors necessitated a rather comprehensive
revision.
All new descriptors, QSAR approaches and chemometric strategies proposed
since 2000 have been included in this handbook. Several new topics such as
biodescriptors, characteristic polynomial-based descriptors, property filters, scoring
functions, and cell-based methods have been added. Other topics, such as substructure
descriptors, autocorrelation descriptors, delocalization degree indices, weighted
matrices, connectivity indices, and so on, have been completely rewritten.