A UNIFICATION OF CHIRALITY MEASURES

A general classification of chirality measures is suggested, based on a new unifying scheme. Two classes of measures - congruity and resolut ion type - are defined and discussed. All chirality measures so far re ported in the literature are found to belong to one of these two class es. At a higher level of unification, a more general construction is s uggested that includes congruity and resolution measures as limiting c ases. It is shown that congruity measures are nested in clusters of ei ght, generated by 2(3) combinations of their possible choice of a refe rence object (chiral vs. achiral), representation form (optimized vs. factorized) and type of chiral object under consideration (discrete vs . continuous). Each of the eight cases can have an infinite number of variations depending on the choice of averaging scheme. The problem of dimensionality is discussed for congruity measures and is shown to be unresolvable only for the case of chirality measures based on the dis crete metric (e.g. overlap measures).