Cloud computing for protein-ligand binding site comparison

Biomed Res Int. 2013:2013:170356. doi: 10.1155/2013/170356. Epub 2013 May 16.

Abstract

The proteome-wide analysis of protein-ligand binding sites and their interactions with ligands is important in structure-based drug design and in understanding ligand cross reactivity and toxicity. The well-known and commonly used software, SMAP, has been designed for 3D ligand binding site comparison and similarity searching of a structural proteome. SMAP can also predict drug side effects and reassign existing drugs to new indications. However, the computing scale of SMAP is limited. We have developed a high availability, high performance system that expands the comparison scale of SMAP. This cloud computing service, called Cloud-PLBS, combines the SMAP and Hadoop frameworks and is deployed on a virtual cloud computing platform. To handle the vast amount of experimental data on protein-ligand binding site pairs, Cloud-PLBS exploits the MapReduce paradigm as a management and parallelizing tool. Cloud-PLBS provides a web portal and scalability through which biologists can address a wide range of computer-intensive questions in biology and drug discovery.

Publication types

  • Comparative Study
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Binding Sites
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Internet
  • Ligands
  • Proteins / metabolism*
  • Software
  • Time Factors

Substances

  • Ligands
  • Proteins