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Predicting synthetic viability

Retrosynthesis has served as a playground for computer-aided design for many decades. Computer-aided methods are usually predicated on human-expert rules or learning algorithms that extract the rules from literature data. Now, an approach that bridges the gap between these computer-driven methods and the traditional, intuition-driven, ‘chalk board’ retrosynthetic methods is reported.

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Fig. 1: When two paths converge: the art of retrosynthesis augmented by human and machine collaboration.

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Correspondence to Anat Milo.

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Eshel, I.L., Milo, A. Predicting synthetic viability. Nat. Synth 2, 473–474 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44160-023-00297-4

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