GRAAL (GénérateuR d’Arômes ALimentaires) is a combinatorial chemistry program. It has been used in the field of aroma compounds but it can be used in all field of chemistry. It generates all possible combinations from a set of starting materials and selected reactions. The  program can be summarized by the following flowchart :

FOR I = 1 TO NBMOL1  (NBMOL1 = number of structures in  file 1)
     load structure I
           FOR J = I to NBMOL2 (NBMOL2 = number of structures in file 2)
               load structure J
                     FOR K= 1 to NBRXN     (NBRXN = number of reactions in the reaction file)
                           search if reaction K is possible between structures I and J,
                           i f yes the program generates the corresponding products  
                     NEXT K
         NEXT J
NEXT I

Some results obtained for the theoretical degradation of thiamine are shown :

Thermal degradation of thiamine generates the follwing structures which are used as starting materials. By combining these structures from known reactions (nucleophilic substitution, nucleophilic addition, elimination, oxidation, etc.) GRAAL generates a first set of structures, which can then be used again as new starting materials, and so on...

More than 3000 structures have been generated. Some basic molecules are shown below :

Papers

8 - Generation of  Potentially New Flavoring Structures from Thiamine by a New Combinatorial Chemistry Program,
R. M. BARONE, M. C. CHANON, G. A. VERNIN, and C. PARKANYI 
in:  A. M. Spanier, F. Shahidi, T. H. Parliment, C. Mussinan, and E. Tratras Contis (Eds.), Food Flavor and Chemistry; Explorations into the 21^st Century.  Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 175-212.

GRAAL has been adapted for generation of new solvents (GRASS program) :

57 - In silico design of bio-based commodity chemicals : application to itaconic acid based solvents
Laurianne Moity, Valérie Molinier, Adrien Benazzouz, René Barone, Phlippe Marion, Jean-Marie Aubry
Green Chem., 2014, 16, 146-160

[Home] [Some dates] [Papers] [sos] [marseil] [conan] [holowin] [graal] [miscellaneous]