2024/10/02 by Ella Gale, Gale, Ella, Leo Lobski +3
Chemistry · #05C92 #Category Theory (math.CT) #F.4.1 #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Mathematics #History and advancements in chemistry #J.2 #Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2410.01421
openalex publication_date 2024/10/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We provide a category theoretical framework capturing two approaches to graph-based models of chemistry: formal reactions and disconnection rules. We model a translation from the latter to the former as a functor, which is faithful, and full up to isomorphism. This allows us to state, as our main result, that the disconnection rules are sound, complete and universal with respect to the reactions. Concretely, this means that every reaction can be decomposed into a sequence of disconnection rules in an essentially unique way. This provides a uniform way to store reaction data, and gives an algorithmic interface between (forward) reaction prediction and (backward) reaction search or retrosynthesis.