Billions of billions of billions of maybe-helpful molecular compounds remain to be discovered, and used for targeting a whole host of medical problems. But who has the time to conjure a novemdecillion drugs? (That number is a 1 with 60 zeroes after it.) Nobody has the tools or the treasure to do that. To help narrow things down, scientists at Duke University and the University of Pittsburgh created an imaginary library of every compound that could exist. The sections are all marked out--now chemists can get to work filling them in.

 

The small molecule universe, or SMU as they call it, is the set of all feasible organic molecules below a certain weight.