Macromolecular Modeling Blog ™

In a recent post, Derek Lowe, from “In The Pipeline”, asks his readership “If we could just walk right up and calculate the free energies of binding events reliably, what would you most want such calculations to be able to do for you? What would convince you that they’re actually believable? And how close to you think that we actually are to that?” We tried to briefly answer some of these questions. How close are we to predict small molecules binding free energy?

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Incorporation of flexibility into docking simulations and accounting for backbone conformational changes during association is probably the toughest problem protein-protein dockers are facing today. Normal Mode Analysis is lately the answer of many groups to this problem. We hereby review two approaches of incorporating NMA into docking simulations, reflecting the induced fit vs. conformational sampling association mechanisms. 

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