New additions to the ClusPro server motivated by CAPRI.

The heavily used protein-protein docking server ClusPro performs three computational steps as follows: (1) rigid body docking, (2) RMSD based clustering of the 1000 lowest energy structures, and (3) the removal of steric clashes by energy minimization. In response to challenges encountered in recent CAPRI targets, we added three new options to ClusPro. These are (1) accounting for small angle X-ray scattering data in docking; (2) considering pairwise interaction data as restraints; and (3) enabling discrimination between biological and crystallographic dimers.

Protein-protein docking by fast generalized Fourier transforms on 5D rotational manifolds.

Energy evaluation using fast Fourier transforms (FFTs) enables sampling billions of putative complex structures and hence revolutionized rigid protein-protein docking. However, in current methods, efficient acceleration is achieved only in either the translational or the rotational subspace. Developing an efficient and accurate docking method that expands FFT-based sampling to five rotational coordinates is an extensively studied but still unsolved problem.

The FTMap family of web servers for determining and characterizing ligand-binding hot spots of proteins.

FTMap is a computational mapping server that identifies binding hot spots of macromolecules-i.e., regions of the surface with major contributions to the ligand-binding free energy.

Docking server for the identification of heparin binding sites on proteins.

Many proteins of widely differing functionality and structure are capable of binding heparin and heparan sulfate. Since crystallizing protein-heparin complexes for structure determination is generally difficult, computational docking can be a useful approach for understanding specific interactions. Previous studies used programs originally developed for docking small molecules to well-defined pockets, rather than for docking polysaccharides to highly charged shallow crevices that usually bind heparin.

How good is automated protein docking?

The protein docking server ClusPro has been participating in critical assessment of prediction of interactions (CAPRI) since its introduction in 2004. This article evaluates the performance of ClusPro 2.0 for targets 46-58 in Rounds 22-27 of CAPRI.

FTMAP: extended protein mapping with user-selected probe molecules.

Binding hot spots, protein sites with high-binding affinity, can be identified using X-ray crystallography or NMR by screening libraries of small organic molecules that tend to cluster at such regions. FTMAP, a direct computational analog of the experimental screening approaches, globally samples the surface of a target protein using small organic molecules as probes, finds favorable positions, clusters the conformations and ranks the clusters on the basis of the average energy. The regions that bind several probe clusters predict the binding hot spots, in good agreement with experimental results.

Conscript: RasMol to PyMOL script converter.

The aim of the Structural Biology Extensible Visualization Scripting Language (SBEVSL) project is to allow users who are experts in one scripting language to use that language in a second molecular visualization environment without requiring the user to learn a new scripting language. ConSCRIPT, the first SBEVSL release, is a plug-in for PyMOL that accepts RasMol scripting commands either as premade scripts or as line-by-line entries from PyMOL's own command line. The plug-in is available for download at http://sourceforge.