antisars drug screening by molecular docking starting from a collection of 1386 druggable compounds obtained from the 3d pharmacophore search we performed a similarity search to narrow down the scope of docking studies the template molecule is kz7088 chou et al 2003 biochem biophys res commun 308 148151 the mdl maccs keys were used to fingerprint the molecules the tanimoto coefficient is taken as the metric to compare fingerprints if the similarity threshold was 08 a set of 50 unique hits and 103 conformers were retrieved as a result of similarity search the autodock 3011 was used to carry out molecular docking of 50 ligands to their macromolecular protein receptors three compounds ie c28h34o4n7cl c21h36o5n6 and c21h36o5n6 were found that may be promising candidates for further investigation the main feature shared by these three potential inhibitors as well as the information of the involved side chains of sars cov mpro may provide useful insights for the development of potent inhibitors against sars enzyme