AutoDock

Stochastic (GA)

Flexible ligand and partially flexible target

ArgusLab

Systematic

Flexible ligandX-Score based

DOCK

Systematic (IC)

Flexible ligandDOCK 3.5 (force field)

eHITS

Systematic (RBD of fragments followed by reconstruction)Flexible ligand and partially flexible targetHiTS_Score (empirical)

FlexX

Systematic (IC)Flexible ligandFlexX SF (empirical)Commercial

FLIPDock

Stochastic (GA)Flexible ligand and flexible targetAUTODOCK (empirical)

FRED

Systematic (RBD)Flexible ligandChemScore, PLP, ScreenScore, ChemGauss (empirical/consensus)

GOLD

Stochastic (GA)

Flexible ligand and partially flexible targetGoldScore, ChemScore (empirical), ASP (knowledge based)

ICM

Stochastic (MC)

Flexible ligand and partially flexible targetICM SF (empirical)

ParDOCK

Stochastic (MC)

RigidBAPPL (empirical)

PLANTS

Stochastic (ACO)Flexible ligand and partially flexible target

CHEMPLP, PLP (empirical)

Surflex

Systematic (IC/MA)Flexible ligandHammerhead based (empirical)

Point to note:

Several studies have shown that the performance of most docking tools is highly dependent on the particular characteristics of both the binding site and the ligand to be investigated, and the determination which method would be more suitable in a specific context is difficult. We encouraged you to check several docking methods to determine which one(s) work best for your system.

Pockets Identification

CASTp

Pocket-Finder

PocketPicker

• Bioconductor – A plethora of tools for analysis and comprehension of high-throughput genomic data, including 1500+ software packages. [ paper-2004 | web ]
• Biopython – Freely available tools for biological computing in Python, with included cookbook, packaging and thorough documentation. Part of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation. Contains the very useful Entrez package for API access to the NCBI databases. [ paper-2009 | web ]
• Bioconda – A channel for the conda package manager specializing in bioinformatics software. Includes a repository with 3000+ ready-to-install (with conda install) bioinformatics packages. [ paper-2018 | web ]
• BioJulia – Bioinformatics and computational biology infastructure for the Julia programming language. [ web ]
• Rust-Bio – Rust implementations of algorithms and data structures useful for bioinformatics. [ paper-2016 ]
• SeqAn – The modern C++ library for sequence analysis.

Protein-protein and protein-DNA/RNA docking based on a hybrid algorithm of template-based modeling and ab initio free docking.

The HDOCK server distinguishes itself from similar docking servers in its ability to support amino acid sequences as input and a hybrid docking strategy in which experimental information about the protein–protein binding site and small-angle X-ray scattering can be incorporated during the docking and post-docking processes.

Address of the bookmark: http://hdock.phys.hust.edu.cn/

ALF
A Simulation Framework for Genome Evolution
http://www.cbrg.ethz.ch/alf

Bayesian Serial SimCoal
Bayesian Serial SimCoal, (BayeSSC) is a modification of SIMCOAL 1.0, a program written by Laurent Excoffier, John Novembre, and Stefan Schneider.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/hadlylab/ssc/index.html

BEERS
BEERS was designed to benchmark RNA-Seq alignment algorithms and also algorithms that aim to reconstruct different isoforms and alternate splicing from RNA-Seq data
http://cbil.upenn.edu/beers/

BOTTLENECK
Bottleneck is a program for detecting recent effective population size reductions from allele data frequencies
http://www.ensam.inra.fr/urlb/bottleneck/bottleneck.html

BottleSim
BottleSim is a computer simulation program for simulating the process of population bottlenecks
http://chkuo.name/software/bottlesim.html

CASS
Protein Sequence Simulation
http://www.wyomingbioinformatics.org/liberlesgroup/cass/

CDPOP
CDPOP is a landscape genetics tool for simulating the emergence of spatial genetic structure in populations resulting from specified landscape processes governing organism movement behavior.
http://cel.dbs.umt.edu/cdpop

CoalFace
CoalFace is a simulation of the coalescent process with the visual display of gene genealogies.
http://web.up.ac.za/default.asp?ipkcategoryid=3283

CoaSim
CoaSim is a tool for simulating the coalescent process with recombination and geneconversion under various demographic models.
http://users-birc.au.dk/mailund/coasim/index.html

cosi
The cosi package is written in C and is available as a tar file.
http://www.broadinstitute.org/~sfs/cosi/

CS-PSeq-Gen
A program to simulate the evolution of protein sequences under the constraints of the information of a particular reconstructed phylogeny
http://bioserv.rpbs.univ-paris-diderot.fr/software/cs-pseq-gen.html

DAWG
An application designed to simulate the evolution of recombinant DNA sequences in continuous time
http://scit.us/projects/dawg

Easypop
EASYPOP is an individual based model intended to simulate datasets under a very broad range of conditions
http://www.unil.ch/dee/page36926_fr.html

EggLib
EggLib is a C++/Python library and program package for evolutionary genetics and genomics.
http://egglib.sourceforge.net/

EvolSimulator
A simulation test bed for hypotheses of genome evolution
http://acb.qfab.org/acb/evolsim/

EvolveAGene
A realistic coding sequence simulation program that separates mutation from selection and allows the user to set selection conditions
http://bellinghamresearchinstitute.com/software/index.html

fastsimcoal
A continuous-¬‐time coalescent simulator of genomic diversity under arbitrarily complex evolutionary scenarios
http://cmpg.unibe.ch/software/fastsimcoal/

FastSLINK
Simulation of Marker and Phenotype Data in Pedigrees
http://watson.hgen.pitt.edu/

FFPopSim
C++/Python library for population genetics.
http://webdav.tuebingen.mpg.de/ffpopsim/

FLUX SIMULATOR
The Flux Simulator aims at providing a deterministic in silico reproduction of the experimental pipelines for RNA-Seq, employing a minimal set of parameters.
http://flux.sammeth.net/simulator.html

ForSim
ForSim: A Forward Evolutionary Computer Simulation
http://www.anthro.psu.edu/weiss_lab/research.shtml

ForwSim
The program given below is based on the algorithm described in Padhukasahasram et al. 2008 to simulate genetic drift in a standard Wright-Fisher process.
http://badri-populationgeneticsimulators.blogspot.com/

FPG
Forward Population Genetic simulation
http://genfaculty.rutgers.edu/hey/software#fpg

FREGENE
FREGENE is a C++ program that simulates sequence-like data over large genomic regions in large diploid populations.
http://www.ebi.ac.uk/projects/bargen/download/fregen/documentation_html.html

GAMETES
Genetic Architecture Model Emulator for Testing and Evaluating Software: Simulates complex SNP models with pure, strict epistatic interactions with n-loci.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gametes/?source=navbar

GASP
Genometric Analysis Simulation Program. A software tool for testing and investigating methods in statistical genetics by generating samples of family data based on user specified models.
http://research.nhgri.nih.gov/gasp/

GemSIM
Next generation sequencing read simulator
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gemsim/

GeneArtisan
Simulation of Markers in Case-Control Study Designs
http://www.rannala.org/?page_id=241

GENOME
A rapid coalescent-based whole genome simulator
http://www.sph.umich.edu/csg/liang/genome/

GenomePop2
GenomePop2 is a specialization of the program GenomePop just to manage SNPs under more flexible and useful settings. If you need models with more than 2 alleles please use the GenomePop program version.
http://webs.uvigo.es/acraaj/genomepop2.htm

GenomeSimla
GenomeSIMLA is currently under development- however, we have a beta release that we are asking to be tested
http://chgr.mc.vanderbilt.edu/genomesimla/

GENS2
Simulates interactions among two genetic and one environmental factor and also allows for epistatic interactions.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/gensim/

GWAsimulator
A rapid whole genome simulation program
http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/main/gwasimulator

HAP-SAMPLE
An association simulator for candidate regions or genome scans
http://www.hapsample.org/

HAPGEN
A simulator for the simulation of case control datasets at SNP markers
https://mathgen.stats.ox.ac.uk/genetics_software/hapgen/hapgen2.html

HapSim
A simulation tool for generating haplotype data with pre-specified allele frequencies and LD coefficients
http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/hapsim/index.html

HAPSIMU
A program that simulates heterogeneous populations with various known and controllable structures under the continuous migration model or the discrete model
http://l.web.umkc.edu/liujian/

IBDsim
IBDSim is a computer package for the simulation of genotypic data under general isolation by distance models.
http://raphael.leblois.free.fr/

indel-Seq-Gen
A biological sequence simulation program that simulates highly divergent DNA sequences and protein superfamilies
http://bioinfolab.unl.edu/~cstrope/isg/

Indelible
A powerful and flexible simulator of biological evolution
http://abacus.gene.ucl.ac.uk/software/indelible/

invertFREGENE
InvertFREGENE is a forward-in-time simulator of inversions in population genetic data
http://www.ebi.ac.uk/projects/bargen/

kernalPop
A spatially explicit population genetic simulation engine
http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/archive/kernelpop/

MaCS
Markovian Coalescent Simulator
http://www-hsc.usc.edu/~garykche/

Mason
A package for the simulation of nucleotide data.
http://www.seqan.de/projects/mason/

mbs
modifying Hudson's ms software to generate samples of DNA sequences with a biallelic site under selection
http://www.sendou.soken.ac.jp/esb/innan/innanlab/software.html

Mendel's Accountant
Mendel's Accountant (MENDEL) is an advanced numerical simulation program for modeling genetic change over time and was developed collaboratively by Sanford, Baumgardner, Brewer, Gibson and ReMine
http://mendelsaccount.sourceforge.net/

MetaSim
A tool to generate collections of synthetic reads that reflect the diverse taxonomical composition of typical metagenome data sets
http://ab.inf.uni-tuebingen.de/software/metasim/

mlcoalsim
Multilocus Coalescent Simulations
http://code.google.com/p/mlcoalsim-v1/

ms
The purpose of this program is to allow one to investigate the statistical properties of such samples, to evaluate estimators or statistical tests, and generally to aid in the interpretation of polymorphism data sets.
http://home.uchicago.edu/~rhudson1/source/mksamples.html

msHOT
The purpose of this program is to allow one to investigate the statistical properties of such samples, to evaluate estimators or statistical tests, and generally to aid in the interpretation of polymorphism data sets.
http://home.uchicago.edu/~rhudson1/

msms
A coalescent Simlation tool with selection.
http://www.mabs.at/ewing/msms/index.shtml

MySSP
A program for the simulation of DNA sequence evolution across a phylogenetic tree
http://www.rosenberglab.net/software.php

Nemo
A forward-time, individual-based, genetically explicit, and stochastic simulation program designed to study the evolution of genetic markers, life history traits, and phenotypic traits in a flexible (meta-)population framework.
http://nemo2.sourceforge.net/

NetRecodon
Coalescent simulation of coding DNA sequences with recombination (inter and intracodon), migration and demography
http://code.google.com/p/netrecodon/

PEDAGOG
Software for simulating eco-evolutionary population dynamics
https://bcrc.bio.umass.edu/pedigreesoftware/node/5

phenosim
A tool to add phenotypes to simulated genotypes
http://evoplant.uni-hohenheim.de/doku.php?id=software:software

PhyloSim
An R package for the Monte Carlo simulation of sequence evolution
http://bit.ly/rlsim-git

pIRS
Profile-based Illumina pair-end reads simulator
https://code.google.com/p/pirs/

ProteinEvolver
Simulation of protein evolution along phylogenies under structure-based substitution models
http://code.google.com/p/proteinevolver/

QMSim
QTL and Marker Simulator
http://www.aps.uoguelph.ca/~msargol/qmsim/

quantiNEMO
An individual-based program for the analysis of quantitative traits with explicit genetic architecture potentially under selection in a structured population
http://www2.unil.ch/popgen/softwares/quantinemo/

RECOAL
Simulates new haplotype data from a reference population of haplotypes.
ftp://popgen.usc.edu/

Recodon
Coalescent simulation of coding DNA sequences with recombination, migration and demography
http://code.google.com/p/recodon/

rlsim
A package for simulating RNA-seq library preparation with parameter estimation
http://bit.ly/rlsim-git

Rmetasim
Rmetasim is a front-end for the metasim engine that is implemented as a package that runs in the statistical computing environment R
http://linum.cofc.edu/software.html#metasim

RNA Seq Simulator
RSS takes SAM alignment files from RNA-Seq data and simulates over dispersed, multiple replica, differential, non-stranded RNA-Seq datasets.
http://useq.sourceforge.net/cmdlnmenus.html#rnaseqsimulator

Rose
Random model of sequence evolution
http://bibiserv.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/rose/

SelSim
SelSim is a program for Monte Carlo simulation of DNA polymorphism data for a recom- bining region within which a single bi-allelic site has experienced natural selection
http://www.well.ox.ac.uk/~spencer/selsim/

Seq-Gen
An application for the Monte Carlo simulation of molecular sequence evolution along phylogenetic trees.
http://tree.bio.ed.ac.uk/software/seqgen/

SEQPower
Statistical power analysis for sequence-based association studies
http://bioinformatics.org/spower/

SeqSIMLA
SeqSIMLA can simulate sequence data with user-specified disease and quantitative trait models. Family or unrelated case-control data can be simulated.
http://seqsimla.sourceforge.net/

Serial NetEvolve
A flexible utility for generating serially-sampled sequences along a tree or recombinant network
http://biorg.cis.fiu.edu/sne/

SFS_CODE
SFS_CODE can perform forward population genetic simulations under a general Wright-Fisher model with arbitrary migration, demographic, selective, and mutational effects.
http://sfscode.sourceforge.net/sfs_code/index/index.html

SIBSIM
Quantitative phenotype simulation in extended pedigrees
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sibsim/

SIMCOAL2
A coalescent program for the simulation of complex recombination patterns over large genomic regions under various demographic models
http://cmpg.unibe.ch/software/simcoal2/

SimCopy
An R package simulating the evolution of copy number profiles along a tree.
http://bit.ly/simcopy

SIMLA
SIMLA is a SIMuLAtion program that generates data sets of families for use in Linkage and Association studies.
http://www.chg.duke.edu/research/simla.html

SimPed
A Simulation Program to Generate Haplotype and Genotype Data for Pedigree Structures
http://www.hgsc.bcm.tmc.edu/content/simped

Simprot
A program to simulate protein evolution by substitution, insertion and deletion
http://www.uhnresearch.ca/labs/tillier/software.htm#3

SimRare
Rare variant simulation and analysis tool
http://code.google.com/p/simrare/

simuGWAS
A forward-time simulator that simulates realistic samples for genome-wide association studies.
http://simupop.sourceforge.net/cookbook/simucomplexdisease

simuPOP
simuPOP is a general-purpose individual-based forward-time population genetics simulation environment.
http://simupop.sourceforge.net/

SISSI
A software tool to generate data of related sequences along a given phylogeny, taking into account user defined system of neighbourhoods and instantaneous rate matrices.
http://www.cibiv.at/software/sissi/

SNPsim
Coalescent simulation of hotspot recombination
http://code.google.com/p/phylosoftware/

SPIP
SPIP simulates the transmission of genes from parents to offspring in a population having demographic structure defined by the user
http://swfsc.noaa.gov/textblock.aspx?division=fed&id=3434

Splatche
Spatial and Temporal Coalescences in Heterogeneous Environment
http://www.splatche.com/

srv
Simulator of Rare Varaints (srv) is a simulator for the simulation of the introduction and evolution of (rare) genetic variants.
http://simupop.sourceforge.net/cookbook/simurarevariants

SUP
SLINK/FastSLINK utility program
http://mlemire.freeshell.org/software.html

TreesimJ
A flexible, forward-time population genetic simulator
http://code.google.com/p/treesimj/

Vortex
VORTEX is an individual-based simulation model for population viability analysis (PVA).
http://www.vortex9.org/vortex.html

References:

Image www.evolution-of-life.com

www.cancer.gov

• Homology-based misassembly correction
• Homology-based assembly scaffolding and patching
• Scaffold merging

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/malonge/RagTag

Summary: The application of protein–protein docking in large-scale interactome analysis is a major challenge in structural bioinformatics and requires huge computing resources. In this work, we present MEGADOCK 4.0, an FFT-based docking software that makes extensive use of recent heterogeneous supercomputers and shows powerful, scalable performance of over 97% strong scaling.

Availability and Implementation: MEGADOCK 4.0 is written in C++ with OpenMPI and NVIDIA CUDA 5.0 (or later) and is freely available to all academic and non-profit users at: http://www.bi.cs.titech.ac.jp/megadock.

Contact: akiyama@cs.titech.ac.jp

Address of the bookmark: http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/08/06/bioinformatics.btu532.short

CASTp : http://sts.bioengr.uic.edu/castp/  Computed Atlas of Surface Topography of proteins (CASTp) provides an online resource for locating, delineating and measuring concave surface regions on three-dimensional structures of proteins. These include pockets located on protein surfaces and voids buried in the interior of proteins. The measurement includes the area and volume of pocket or void by solvent accessible surface model (Richards' surface) and by molecular surface model (Connolly's surface), all calculated analytically. CASTp can be used to study surface features and functional regions of proteins. CASTp includes a graphical user interface, flexible interactive visualization, as well as on-the-fly calculation for user uploaded structures. CASTp is updated daily and can be accessed at http://cast.engr.uic.edu.

LigASite: http://www.bigre.ulb.ac.be/Users/benoit/LigASite/index.php?home is a gold-standard dataset of biologically relevant binding sites in protein structures. It consists of proteins with one unbound structure and at least one structure of the protein-ligand complex. Both a redundant and a non-redundant (sequence identity lower than 25%) version is available. Quaternary structures proposed by PISA (3) are used for all structures in the dataset.

PDBeMotif: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/pdbe-site/pdbemotif/ is an extremely fast and powerful search tool that facilitates exploration of the Protein Data Bank (PDB) by combining protein sequence, chemical structure and 3D data in a single search. Currently it is the only tool that offers this kind of integration at this speed. PDBeMotif can be used to examine the characteristics of the binding sites of single proteins or classes of proteins such as Kinases and the conserved structural features of their immediate environments either within the same specie or across different species. For example, it can highlight a conserved activation loop common to protein kinases, which is important in regulating activity and is marked by conserved DFG and APE motifs at the start and end of the loop, respectively. The prediction of the effect of modifications to small molecules that bind to the active and/or regulatory sites of proteins on their efficacy can be based on the outcome of analytic work done using PDBeMotif.

fPOP: http://pocket.uchicago.edu/fpop/ (footprinting Pockets Of Proteins, http://pocket.uchicago.edu/fpop/) is a database of the protein functional surfaces identified by shape analysis. In this relational database, we collected the spatial patterns of protein binding sites including both holo and apo forms from more than 40,000 structures. To identify protein binding sites, we model the shape of a split pocket induced by a binding ligand(s). Essentially, we use a purely geometric method to extract site-specific spatial patterns of split pockets as templates to match those from unbound structures. To perform an effective shape comparison, we utilize the Smith-Waterman algorithm to footprint an unbound pocket fragment with those selected from the canonical functional surfaces of >19,000 structures in the SplitPocket (http://pocket.uchicago.edu/). The pairwise alignment of the unbound and split-pocket fragments is superimposed to evaluate the local structural similarity for detecting the unbound split characteristic through the RMSD measurement. Furthermore, we conduct a large-scale computation to systematically identify binding sites of proteins. In addition to the geometric measurements, we extensively measure the propensity of surface conservation encapsulated in the evolutionary history.(more)

metaPocket: http://metapocket.eml.org/  is a meta server to identify pockets on protein surface to predict ligand-binding sites. The identification of ligand-binding sites is often the starting point for protein function annotation and structure-based drug design. Many computational methods for the prediction of ligand-binding sites have been developed in recent decades. Here we present a consensus method metaPocket, in which the predicted sites from four methods: LIGSITE^cs, PASS, Q-SiteFinder, and SURFNET are combined together to improve the prediction success rate. All these methods are evaluated on two datasets of 48 unbound/bound structures and 210 bound structures. The comparison results show that metaPocket improves the success rate from 70 to 75% at the top 1 prediction. MetaPocket is available at http://metapocket.eml.org.

PocketQuery: http://pocketquery.csb.pitt.edu/  is a web service for interactively exploring not only hot spot and anchor residues, but hot regions, defined by clusters of residues, at the interface of protein-protein interactions. An assortment of metrics, including changes in solvent accessible surface area, energy-based scores, and sequence conservation, are available to screen and sort clusters of residues. PocketQuery was developed by David Koes from the Camacho Lab in the Department of Computational and System Biology at the University of Pittsburgh.

IBIS: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Structure/ibis/ibis.cgi is the NCBI Inferred Biomolecular Interactions Server. For a given protein sequence or structure query, IBIS reports physical interactions observed in experimentally-determined structures for this protein. IBIS also infers/predicts interacting partners and binding sites by homology, by inspecting the protein complexes formed by close homologs of a given query. To ensure biological relevance of inferred binding sites, the IBIS algorithm clusters binding sites formed by homologs based on binding site sequence and structure conservation.

3DLigandStie: http://www.sbg.bio.ic.ac.uk/~3dligandsite/ is an automated method for the prediction of ligand binding sites. Users can either submit a sequence or a protein structure. If a sequence is submitted then Phyre is run to predict the structure. The structure is then ussed to search a structural library to identify homologous structures with bound ligands. These ligands are superimposed onto the protein structure to predict a ligand binding site.

SitesBase: http://www.modelling.leeds.ac.uk/sb/ is a database of known ligand binding sites within the PDB which is navigable by PDB identifier or ligand 3 letter code e.g. NAD. Each binding site has a frequently updated register of structurally similar binding sites sharing atomic similarity detected by geometric hashing (Brakoulias and Jackson 2004). Multiple alignments, structural superpositions and links to other structural databases are also available enabling further analysis.

PROSURFER: http://163.43.140.95/top contains information about structural similarities with respect to the query surfaces. A pocket search algorithm detected 48,347 potential ligand binding sites from the 9,708 non-redundant protein entries in the PDB database. All-against-all structural comparison was performed for the predicted sites, and the similar sites with the Z-score ≥ 2.5 were selected. These results can be accessed by the PDB code or ligand name.

KBDOCK: http://kbdock.loria.fr/index.php is a 3D database system that defines and spatially clusters protein binding sites for knowledge-based protein docking. KBDOCK integrates protein domain-domain interaction information from 3DID and sequence alignments from PFAM together with structural information from the PDB in order to analyse the spatial arrangements of DDIs by Pfam family, and to propose structural templates for protein docking. [More]

Pocketome: http://www.pocketome.org/ The Pocketome is an encyclopedia of conformational ensembles of all druggable binding sites that can be identified experimentally from co-crystal structures in the Protein Data Bank.

sc-PDB: http://cheminfo.u-strasbg.fr:8080/scPDB/2011/db_search/about_scpdb.html  To assist structure-based approaches in drug design, we have processed the PDB to identify binding sites suitable for the docking of a drug-like ligand and we have so created a database called sc-PDB. The sc-PDB database provides separated MOL2 files for the ligand, its binding site and the corresponding protein chain(s). Ions and cofactors at the vicinity of the ligand are included in the protein. More details about the sc-PDB scope, its content and its evolution during the 2004-2009 period are provided in a pdf document.

The FunFOLD Binding Site Residue Prediction Server: BACKGROUND: The accurate prediction of ligand binding residues from amino acid sequences is important for the automated functional annotation of novel proteins. In the previous two CASP experiments, the most successful methods in the function prediction category were those which used structural superpositions of 3D models and related templates with bound ligands in order to identify putative contacting residues. However, whilst most of this prediction process can be automated, visual inspection and manual adjustments of parameters, such as the distance thresholds used for each target, have often been required to prevent over prediction. Here we describe a novel method FunFOLD, which uses an automatic approach for cluster identification and residue selection. The software provided can easily be integrated into existing fold recognition servers, requiring only a 3D model and list of templates as inputs. A simple web interface is also provided allowing access to non-expert users. The method has been benchmarked against the top servers and manual prediction groups tested at both CASP8 and CASP9.RESULTS: The FunFOLD method shows a significant improvement over the best available servers and is shown to be competitive with the top manual prediction groups that were tested at CASP8. The FunFOLD method is also competitive with both the top server and manual methods tested at CASP9. When tested using common subsets of targets, the predictions from FunFOLD are shown to achieve a significantly higher mean Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) scores and Binding-site Distance Test (BDT) scores than all server methods that were tested at CASP8. Testing on the CASP9 set showed no statistically significant separation in performance between FunFOLD and the other top server groups tested. CONCLUSIONS: The FunFOLD software is freely available as both a standalone package and a prediction server, providing competitive ligand binding site residue predictions for expert and non-expert users alike. The software provides a new fully automated approach for structure based function prediction using 3D models of proteins.

ProBiS: http://probis.cmm.ki.si/index.php  algorithm for detection of structurally similar protein binding sites by local structural alignment. Motivation: Exploitation of locally similar 3D patterns of physicochemical properties on the surface of a protein for detection of binding sites that may lack sequence and global structural conservation. Results: An algorithm, ProBiS is described that detects structurally similar sites on protein surfaces by local surface structure alignment. It compares the query protein to members of a database of protein 3D structures and detects with sub-residue precision, structurally similar sites as patterns of physicochemical properties on the protein surface. Using an efficient maximum clique algorithm, the program identifies proteins that share local structural similarities with the query protein and generates structure-based alignments of these proteins with the query. Structural similarity scores are calculated for the query protein's surface residues, and are expressed as different colors on the query protein surface. The algorithm has been used successfully for the detection of protein–protein, protein–small ligand and protein–DNA binding sites. Availability: The software is available, as a web tool, free of charge for academic users at http://probis.cmm.ki.si

Active Site prediction: http://www.scfbio-iitd.res.in/dock/ActiveSite_new.jsp Active Site Prediction of Protein server computes the cavities in a given protein.

DEPTH: http://mspc.bii.a-star.edu.sg/tankp/run_depth.html Depth measures the closest distance of a residue/atom to bulk solvent. Accessible surface area is a parameter that is widely used in analyses of protein structure and stability. However accessible surface area does not distinguish between atoms just below the protein surface and those in the core of the protein. In order to differentiate between such buried residues, we describe a computational procedure for calculating the depth of a residue from the protein surface. A detailed description of the computation of depth can be found here.

FINDSITE: http://cssb.biology.gatech.edu/findsite  FINDSITE is a threading-based binding site prediction/protein functional inference/ligand screening algorithm that detects common ligand binding sites in a set of evolutionarily related proteins. Crystal structures as well as protein models can be used as the target structures.

PocketDepth: http://proline.physics.iisc.ernet.in/pocketdepth/  A new depth based algortihm for identification of ligand binding sites. Abstract: Computational methods for identifying and predicting functional sites in protein structures are increasingly becoming important in structural biology and bioinformatics not only for understanding the function of the molecule in detail but also for structure-based design of possible ligands and potential drugs as well as modified protein molecules. While there are a few structure based prediction methods already available, given the complexity and diversity of protein structural types, there is still a great need to explore newer methods and concepts to develop accurate, versatile and efficient binding site prediction algorithms. We have developed a new method PocketDepth, for identification of binding sites in proteins. The method is purely geometry-based and proceeds in two stages, labeling of grid cells with depth factors followed by a depth based clustering that uses neighbourhood information. Depth is an important parameter considered during protein structure visualization and analysis but has been used more often intuitively than systematically. Our current implementation of depth reflects how central a given sub-space is to a putative pocket rather than reflecting merely how far away it is situated from the nearest external surface of the protein. We have tested the algorithm against PDBbind, a large curated set of 1091 proteins obtained from PDB. A prediction was considered a true-positive if the predicted pocket had at-least 10% overlap with the actual ligand. The prediction accuracy using this set was about 96%. Moreover, 87% of the true-positives were identified within the first five ranks for each protein, of which 55% are in the first rank itself. 77% of the predictions had at least 50% overlap with the experimentally observed ligand. High prediction rates were again observed, when the method was tested against a data-set of apo-proteins and compared with their respective ligand complexes. A comparison of our method with four other widely used methods for a chosen representative set is also presented.

GHECOM 1.0 : http://strcomp.protein.osaka-u.ac.jp/ghecom/  Grid-based HECOMi finder. A program for finding multi-scale pockets on protein surfaces using mathematical morphology

Pocket-Finder: http://www.modelling.leeds.ac.uk/pocketfinder/ is based on the Ligsite algorithm written by Hendlich et al. (1997). Pocket-Finder was written to compare pocket detection with our new ligand binding site detction algorithm Q-SiteFinder.

Screen2: http://luna.bioc.columbia.edu/honiglab/screen2/cgi-bin/screen2.cgi  is a tool for identifying protein cavities and computing cavity attributes that can be applied for classification and analysis. The original Screen, written by Murad Nayal, was dependent on the obsolete Irix platform and is no longer available. Screen2 was reengineered by Brian Y. Chen for efficiency and compatibility, and made accessible as a web service by Raquel Norel.

ConCavity: http://compbio.cs.princeton.edu/concavity/ Identifying a protein's functional sites is an important step towards characterizing its molecular function. Numerous structure- and sequence-based methods have been developed for this problem. Here we introduce ConCavity, a small molecule binding site prediction algorithm that integrates evolutionary sequence conservation estimates with structure-based methods for identifying protein surface cavities. In large-scale testing on a diverse set of single- and multi-chain protein structures, we show that ConCavity substantially outperforms existing methods for identifying both 3D ligand binding pockets and individual ligand binding residues. As part of our testing, we perform one of the first direct comparisons of conservation-based and structure-based methods. We find that the two approaches provide largely complementary information, which can be combined to improve upon either approach alone. We also demonstrate that ConCavity has state-of-the-art performance in predicting catalytic sites and drug binding pockets. Overall, the algorithms and analysis presented here significantly improve our ability to identify ligand binding sites and further advance our understanding of the relationship between evolutionary sequence conservation and structural and functional attributes of proteins. Data, source code, and prediction visualizations are available on the ConCavity web site (http://compbio.cs.princeton.edu/concavit​y/).

MultiBind and MAPPIS: http://bioinfo3d.cs.tau.ac.il/MultiBind/index.html Web servers for multiple alignment of protein 3D binding sites and their interactions. Analysis of protein–ligand complexes and recognition of spatially conserved physico-chemical properties is important for the prediction of binding and function. Here, we present two webservers for multiple alignment and recognition of binding patterns shared by a set of protein structures. The first webserver, MultiBind (http://bioinfo3d.cs.tau.ac.il/MultiBind), performs multiple alignment of protein binding sites. It recognizes the common spatial chemical binding patterns even in the absence of similarity of the sequences or the folds of the compared proteins. The input to the MultiBind server is a set of protein-binding sites defined by interactions with small molecules. The output is a detailed list of the shared physico-chemical binding site properties. The second webserver, MAPPIS (http://bioinfo3d.cs.tau.ac.il/MAPPIS), aims to analyze protein–protein interactions. It performs multiple alignment of protein–protein interfaces (PPIs), which are regions of interaction between two protein molecules. MAPPIS recognizes the spatially conserved physico-chemical interactions, which often involve energetically important hot-spot residues that are crucial for protein–protein associations. The input to the MAPPIS server is a set of protein-protein complexes. The output is a detailed list of the shared interaction properties of the interfaces.

MolAxis: http://bioinfo3d.cs.tau.ac.il/MolAxis/  is a tool for the identification of high clearance pathways or corridors which represent molecular channels in the complement space of proteins. It is extremely efficient because it samples the medial axis of the complement of the molecule, reducing the problem dimension to two, since the medial axis is composed of surface patches. It is designed to analyze proteins channels, calculate pore dimensions and analyze atom accessibility. MolAxis reads files in the standard Protein Data Bank format (PDB) containing a single frame or multiple frames generated by molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. MolAxis handles two distinct scenarios: It computes channels that connect a single point (like an inner chamber) to the bulk solvent, and it also computes transmembrane (TM) channels. MolAxis has a friendly web interface (see the Web Server tab). It also has a stand-alone version, statically compiled for linux, which can be downloaded from the Download tab.

fpocket: http://fpocket.sourceforge.net/ fpocket is a very fast open source protein pocket (cavity) detection algorithm based on Voronoi tessellation. It was developed in the C programming language and is currently available as command line driven program. A GUI is in development and mdpocket (fpocket on md trajectories) is out now. fpocket includes two other programs (dpocket & tpocket) that allow you to extract pocket descriptors and test own scoring functions respectively. Furthermore a nifty druggability prediction score has been added to fpocket recently. As the algorithm is very fast it can be used on a large scale level (PDB size for instance). If you use fpocket for publication, please cite : Vincent Le Guilloux, Peter Schmidtke and Pierre Tuffery, "Fpocket: An open source platform for ligand pocket detection", BMC Bioinformatics, 2009, 10:168

SuMo: http://sumo-pbil.ibcp.fr/cgi-bin/sumo-welcome allows you to screen the Protein Data Bank (PDB) for finding ligand binding sites matching your protein structure or inversely, for finding protein structures matching a given site in your protein. This method is neither based on aminoacid sequence nor on fold comparisons. Priority is given to biological relevance. SuMo uses its own heuristics for defining ligand binding sites. Automatically selected ligand binding sites are extracted from PDB structure files and stored into SuMo's own database.

CAVER: http://www.caver.cz/ CAVER is a software tool for analysis and visualization of tunnels and channels in protein structures. Tunnels are void pathways leading from a cavity buried in a protein core to the surrounding solvent. Unlike tunnels, channels lead through the protein structure and their both endings are opened to the surrounding solvent. Studying of these pathways is highly important for drug design and molecular enzymology.

SiteHound: http://scbx.mssm.edu/sitehound/sitehound-download/download.html SiteHound identifies protein regions that are likely to interact with ligands. The only input files required by SITEHOUND are the PDB file of the protein and the Molecular Interaction Field (MIFs) or Affinity Map for that protein structure structure. EasyMIFs is provided as a tool to calculate MIFs, alternatively AutoGrid (part of the AutoDock suite developed by Arthur Olson’s group at The Scripps Research Insitute) or the SiteHound-web server can be used to produce Affinity maps or MIFs. A python script named 'auto.py' is provided in the package and can be used to perform binding site identification in a fully automated fashion. The script will prepare the protein PDB file, compute a Molecular Interaction Fields map with EasyMIFs and carry out binding site identification using SiteHound. It is also possible to use EasyMIFs and SiteHound separately.

SURFNET: http://www.biochem.ucl.ac.uk/~roman/surfnet/surfnet.html The SURFNET program generates surfaces and void regions between surfaces from coordinate data supplied in a PDB file.

MSPocket: http://appserver.biotec.tu-dresden.de/MSPocket/ is an orientation independent program for the detection and graphical analysis of protein surface pockets [Zhu2011]. The approach is based on the solvent excluded surfaces generated by MSMS [Sanner1996].

Pfinder : http://pdbfun.uniroma2.it/pfinder/index.html  Pfinder is a bioinformatic method for the prediction of phosphate-binding sites in protein structures. Given a protein structure, Pfinder compares it with a set of 215 highly conserved structural motifs known to bind the phosphate moiety of phosphorylated ligands.

VOIDOO: http://xray.bmc.uu.se/usf/voidoo.html is a program for detection of cavities in macromolecular structures. It uses an algorithm that makes it possible to detect even certain types of cavities that are connected to "the outside world". Three different types of cavity can be handled by VOIDOO: Vanderwaals cavities (the complement of the molecular Vanderwaals surface), probe-accessible cavities (the cavity volume that can be occupied by the centres of probe atoms) and MS-like probe-occupied cavities (the volume that can be occupied by probe atoms, i.e. including their radii).

PocketPicker: http://gecco.org.chemie.uni-frankfurt.de/pocketpicker/index.html Background: Identification and evaluation of surface binding-pockets and occluded cavities are initial steps in protein structure-based drug design. Characterizing the active site's shape as well as the distribution of surrounding residues plays an important role for a variety of applications such as automated ligand docking or in situ modeling. Comparing the shape similarity of binding site geometries of related proteins provides further insights into the mechanisms of ligand binding. Results: We present PocketPicker, an automated grid-based technique for the prediction of protein binding pockets that specifies the shape of a potential binding-site with regard to its buriedness. The method was applied to a representative set of protein-ligand complexes and their corresponding apo-protein structures to evaluate the quality of binding-site predictions. The performance of the pocket detection routine was compared to results achieved with the existing methods CAST, LIGSITE, LIGSITE^cs, PASS and SURFNET. Success rates PocketPicker were comparable to those of LIGSITE^cs and outperformed the other tools. We introduce a descriptor that translates the arrangement of grid points delineating a detected binding-site into a correlation vector. We show that this shape descriptor is suited for comparative analyses of similar binding-site geometry by examining induced-fit phenomena in aldose reductase. This new method uses information derived from calculations of the buriedness of potential binding-sites. Conclusion: The pocket prediction routine of PocketPicker is a useful tool for identification of potential protein binding-pockets. It produces a convenient representation of binding-site shapes including an intuitive description of their accessibility. The shape-descriptor for automated classification of binding-site geometries can be used as an additional tool complementing elaborate manual inspections.

McVol: http://www.bisb.uni-bayreuth.de/index.php?page=data/mcvol/mcvol  This program was developed to integrate the molecular volume, solven accessible volume an Van der Waals volume of proteins using a Monte carlo algorithm. Based on this calculations, McVol is also able to identify internal cavities as well as surface clefts und fill these cavities with water molecules. Additionally, a membrane of dummy atoms can be placed as a disc atound the protein. The program is available under the Gnu Public Licence. A precompiled binary (X86) can be downloaded free of charge from here (when the associated paper is published).

The most common newbie questions are:

Should I try to use these free open source programs?  Why are we not trying GUI software for computational analysis? Should I use commercial bioinformatics programs/software?”

1. Let’s be open

We generally think free and cheap are useless. But this concept is not applicable when we discuss open source software. Mostly, the bioinformatics software is developed by highly competitive biological programmers who believe in open sharing of knowledge. They come under Open Bioinformatics Foundation or O|B|F which is a non-profit, volunteer run organization focused on supporting open source programming in bioinformatics. The best part about open source tools/software is that they’re free to download the source code and read exactly what the program does. If you are so inclined, you can view all of the parts of the program and see the logical flow of the pipeline. In addition, open source makes an excellent learning tool for any beginning bioinformatician. Moreover, you can modify existing open source programs to deal with cutting-edge problems or to customize your pipeline. Apart from your computational and analysis work, most of the reviewer also prefers the open source based results so that they can validate the results if validation required.

2. Code headache

As a bioinformatician you are supposed to know the basics of programming languages, and if you are not good at it, then please learn it as soon as possible because you are not a bio-analyst but biological programmers. The open source programs usually lack dedicated service and support teams (often because they were the product of an overworked doc/postdoc!) so you are responsible for troubleshooting your own errors most of the time. We commonly receive the HELP email to support and assist to setup the pipeline; you can also find this kind of request on any QA forum. I personally believe this coding horror brings the biggest downside of open-source programs; where you need some programming skills in order to implement the program in your pipeline. But, if you are not able to fix the pipeline and modify the open source code according to your requirements them you should re-think on your bioinformatician name tag!!!

3. Dive into the codes

Some of the biologist turn bioinformatician says “if you can do the same thing with commercial software then why to get migraine with weird codes”, well this statement looks to me that guys are keen to learn swimming but still don’t like to get wet. If you are still using paid software and doing your work by customer support and clicking some of the well-designed GUI button then perhaps you are not interested in learning and trying new and challenging bioinformatics works. You are missing the basic flavour of bioinformatics. Let’s dive into the coding world, I am sure your will enjoy it. I recommend your to swim freely in code’s sea, and enjoy the journey; do not merely watch it from the outside.  

4. Paid does not mean better

The bioinformatics company which are specializes in bioinformatics solutions develop well designed/packed, user friendly software by using a large number of specialised scientist, programmers and support staff. They also provide good services to accomplice your biological analysis work. This means that if you hit a ‘snag’ with your data, help is likely only a phone call away! These companies price their products competitively against the cost of a dedicated bioinformatician. You may be able to afford the program, but not the additional staff! Additionally, most of the functionality that you need in your analysis is already coded into the program. Need to plot a graph? Just click this button right here. It is that easy. But, as a bioinformatician this is not generally well encouraged approach in biological analysis work, because the software is not available to everyone and your data can’t be validated. Moreover, there is very less chances that anyone will repeat your work or love to do similar kind of research (because not all the labs in the world are rich like yours).

5. Take a caution

In biological analysis work, in which you deal GB/TB of data are having maximum chances of getting errors, so please be careful and always cross check your data before coming to any conclusion. Even an error in two line code can alter your entire analysis and display weird results. Some of the scientist blindly believes on commercial software, which is entirely wrong. Using proprietary tools does not absolve you of the need to actually read and research the type of analysis that you are doing. This is particularly true in the case of genome assembly and annotation.

At the end, I would like to tell only one think that open source solutions allows you to do more cutting edge analysis than the commercial tools. So let’s go for it.

Disclaimer:

This is my personal view. I have nothing to do with any company or open source community. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my current/past employers. I do reserve the right to remove comments left by spammers or off-topic comments.

With Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) Sequencing, you can access structural variations having a broad range of sizes, types, and GC content with the ability to:

• Uncover missing heritability linked to structural variation
• Unambiguously identify genomic context and variant breakpoints at the sequence level to unravel the genetic etiology of disease
• Resolve structural variation across the complete size spectrum with basepair resolution

Following are the SV tools, which can assist you to achieve your goal.

Sniffles: Structural variation caller using third generation sequencing

Sniffles is a structural variation caller using third generation sequencing (PacBio or Oxford Nanopore). It detects all types of SVs using evidence from split-read alignments, high-mismatch regions, and coverage analysis. Please note the current version of Sniffles requires sorted output from BWA-MEM (use -M and -x parameter) or NGM-LR with the optional SAM attributes enabled! 

More at https://github.com/fritzsedlazeck/Sniffles

MultiBreak-SV: It identifies structural variants from next-generation paired end data, third-generation long read data, or data from a combination of sequencing platforms.

There are two pieces of software in this release: (1) a pre-processor that takes machineformat (.m5) BLASR files, and (2) MultiBreak-SV. For installation and usage instructions, see doc/MultiBreakSV-Manual.txt.

More at https://github.com/raphael-group/multibreak-sv

Parliament: A Structural Variation Tool. Why ask a single sv-detection approach to find every variant when you can have a parliament of tools deciding?

Publication about the algorithm and “…the first long-read characterization of structural variation in a diploid human personal genome…” (HS1011) - “Assessing structural variation in a personal genome—towards a human reference diploid genome”

More at https://sourceforge.net/projects/parliamentsv/

https://www.dnanexus.com/papers/Parliament_Info_Sheet.pdf

PBHoney: the structural variation discovery tool 

PBHoney is an implementation of two variant-identification approaches designed to exploit the high mappability of long reads (i.e., greater than 10,000 bp). PBHoney considers both intra-read discordance and soft-clipped tails of long reads to identify structural variants.

Read The Paper http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/15/180/abstract

More at https://sourceforge.net/projects/pb-jelly/

SMRT-SV: Structural variant and indel caller for PacBio reads

Structural variant (SV) and indel caller for PacBio reads based on methods from Chaisson et al. 2014.

SMRT-SV provides an official software package for tools described in Chaisson et al. 2014 and adds several key features including the following.

• Unified variant calling user interface with built-in cluster compute support
• Small indel calling (2-49 bp)
• Improved inversion calling (screenInversions)
• Quality metric for SV calls based on number of local assemblies supporting each call
• Higher sensitivity for SV calls using tiled local assemblies across the entire genome instead of "signature" regions
• Genotyping of SVs with Illumina paired-end reads from WGS samples

More at https://github.com/EichlerLab/pacbio_variant_caller