Abstract
Structure based drug design is a technique that is used in the initial stages of a drug discovery program. The role of various computational methods in the characterization of the chemical properties and behavior of molecular systems is discussed. The field of bioinformatics has become a major part of the drug discovery pipeline playing a key role for validating drug targets. By integrating data from many inter-related yet heterogeneous resources, informatics can help in our understanding of complex biological processes and help improve drug discovery. The determination of the three dimensional properties of small molecules and macromolecular receptor structures is a core activity in the efforts towards a better understanding of structure-activity relationships.