SPOT-ligand 2: improving structure-based virtual screening by binding-homology search on an expanded structural template library.

Motivation: The high cost of drug discovery motivates the development of accurate virtual screening tools. Binding-homology, which takes advantage of known protein-ligand binding pairs, has emerged as a powerful discrimination technique. In order to exploit all available binding data, modelled structures of ligand-binding sequences may be used to create an expanded structural binding template library.

Results: SPOT-Ligand 2 has demonstrated significantly improved screening performance over its previous version by expanding the template library 15 times over the previous one. It also performed better than or similar to other binding-homology approaches on the DUD and DUD-E benchmarks.

Availability and Implementation: The server is available online at https://sparks-lab.org .

Contacts: [email protected] or [email protected].

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.