EDIAscorer

DoGSite3 was developed for predicting robust and reliable small molecule binding sites and computing their geometrical and chemical descriptors. It is based on the grid-based DoGSite algorithm for predicting pockets and their sub-pockets. The new tool is largely rotation- and translation-invariant due to a normalization procedure before binding site prediction. Known ligands in the structure can be used to bias the grid by sufficiently buried ligand fragments. The output encompasses novel chemical binding site descriptors considering solvent accessibility. Compared to its predecessor, it shows increased robustness through comprehensive parameter optimization. DoGSite3 runs finish within seconds.

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.

LifeSoaks was designed to find solvent channels in macromolecular structures solved by X-ray crystallography. It predicts their accessibility by molecules through an automated annotation of so-called bottleneck radii. It simplifies the process of manually checking a crystal structure for solvent channels. Bottleneck radii can be calculated for solvent channels and small molecule binding sites. The tool is ideally suited for channel analyses before the actual soaking experiments to select the most promising experimental conditions and crystal forms. LifeSoaks runs fully automated and will finish within seconds to minutes for moderately sized crystals.

DoGSiteScorer is a grid-based automated pocket detection and analysis tool. It applies a Difference of Gaussian filter to detect potential binding pockets and splits them into sub-pockets. The method solely uses the 3D structure of the protein. Global properties, describing the size, shape, and chemical features of the predicted (sub-)pockets, are calculated. Per default, a simple druggability score based on a linear combination of the three descriptors describing volume, hydrophobicity, and enclosure is provided for each (sub-)pocket. Furthermore, a subset of meaningful descriptors is incorporated in a support vector machine (libsvm) to predict the (sub-)pocket druggability score (values are between zero and one). The higher the score, the more druggable the pocket is estimated to be.

Three-dimensional protein structures play a vital role in drug design. Structure-based design necessitates an in-depth examination of the available quality data before using the structure in computational experiments and for method evaluation. StructureProfiler assists in automatically profiling sets of protein-ligand complex structures based on multiple quality indicators, ranging from model characteristics, e.g., the R factor, and active site features, e.g., bond length deviations, to ligand properties such as electron density support and the validity of torsion angles.

GeoMine enables the automated mining of protein-ligand binding sites. Based on individually designed queries, users can search for spatial interaction patterns in huge collections of protein-ligand complexes and binding pockets. The regularly updated GeoMine database relies on the free database systems SQLite and PostgreSQL. It supports radius-based pockets (based on ligands and predicted pockets (based on DoGSite3) for query generation. The query management is based on XML (for the REST service) or JSON in the GUI mode. Its output consists of the query-based superpositions of the matched binding sites and statistics on matching points, distances, and angles.