BioExcel Building Blocks tutorials: Protein-Protein Docking

This tutorial aims to illustrate the process of protein-ligand docking, step by step, using the BioExcel Building Blocks library (biobb).

This tutorial aims to illustrate the process of computing a conformational transition between two known structural conformations of a protein, step by step, using the BioExcel Building Blocks (biobb).

A structural pharmacology workbench for cognition-related CNS targets, built so that a displayed number must trace to a computation. Runs Boltz-2 locally for structure prediction, validates chemistry with RDKit, enforces a provenance record on every value, and reports eight studies pre-registered under content hashes before any data was seen. Its headline result is negative: designed peptides did not separate from composition-matched shuffles of their own amino acids.

WarPP predicts the position and orientation of water molecules in small-molecule binding sites. It places and scores water molecules in binding sites of crystallographic structures based on EDIAscorer results and interaction geometries as known from experimentally solved protein structures. WarPP was validated on a high-quality set of 1,500 protein-ligand complexes, containing 20,000 crystallographically observed water molecules. It is sufficiently fast for high-throughput analyses. It correctly places water molecules in approx. 80% of the cases. Users can export the predictions as PDB files for, e.g., molecular docking with JAMDA.

Protoss is a fully automated hydrogen atom placement tool for protein-ligand complexes. It adds missing hydrogen atoms to protein structures and detects reasonable protonation states, tautomeric states, and hydrogen coordinates of both protein and ligand molecules by optimizing the hydrogen bond network.

JAMDA enables the preparation of individual protein structures and the docking of small molecules in preprocessed binding sites of choice. JAMDA simplifies the process of protein-ligand docking by automatic preprocessing protocols for the protein and binding sites of interest. The JAMDAscore scoring function retrieved 75% of the native poses in the three highest-ranked solutions for high-quality protein-ligand complexes with default settings. Individual configurations for protein preparation are available, e.g., considering protein ensembles, relevant binding site water molecules, or cofactors. A user-defined number of input conformations for the ligands of interest can be generated fully automated using Conformator. Alternatively, users can also provide externally prepared ligand conformers.