“…Furthermore, searches for the MCS of many structures are computationally very demanding. Therefore, the common structural properties of a set of structures are described by a set of characteristic substructures, each of them being the MCS of a pair of structures. − Such a set of characteristic substructures is obtained as follows: In the first step for each of the n ( n − 1)/2 pairs of structures, the MCS is determined. In the second step for each MCS i found in step 1, the number of occurrences, n i (frequency), in the n structures is counted by applying substructure searches.…”