TY - JOUR
T1 - DruGUI 2.0
T2 - mapping protein druggability with probe-based molecular dynamics
AU - Ventura, Carlos
AU - Lee, Ji Young
AU - Bogetti, Anthony T.
AU - Banerjee, Anupam
AU - Licht, Matthew
AU - Bahar, Ivet
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2026. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
PY - 2026/7
Y1 - 2026/7
N2 - Summary: We introduce DruGUI 2.0, a drug discovery tool for assessing the druggability of proteins, integrated into the ProDy application programming interface (API). DruGUI 2.0 is developed to facilitate the search for druggable sites while allowing for proteins’ conformational flexibility. Simulations in explicit solvent, with an option to include membrane, are carried out in the presence of probe molecules selected from an expanded library of small molecules containing drug-like fragments. Druggable sites beyond orthosteric sites are identifiable, as well as the probes that show high affinity to bind to those sites. Characterization of the composition and position of the probes helps build pharmacophore models and estimate relative binding affinities. As a Python module with enhanced visualization features, DruGUI 2.0 complements, and benefits from, the vast collection of protein sequence, structure, and dynamics analyses modules accessible in ProDy. Case studies in the Supplemental Material showcase the utility of DruGUI 2.0 applied to both soluble targets and membrane proteins. Availability: ProDy is open-sourced and freely available under MIT License from https://github.com/prody/ProDy. The code version of DruGUI 2.0 used for simulations is available on Zenodo : 10.5281/zenodo.20511357.
AB - Summary: We introduce DruGUI 2.0, a drug discovery tool for assessing the druggability of proteins, integrated into the ProDy application programming interface (API). DruGUI 2.0 is developed to facilitate the search for druggable sites while allowing for proteins’ conformational flexibility. Simulations in explicit solvent, with an option to include membrane, are carried out in the presence of probe molecules selected from an expanded library of small molecules containing drug-like fragments. Druggable sites beyond orthosteric sites are identifiable, as well as the probes that show high affinity to bind to those sites. Characterization of the composition and position of the probes helps build pharmacophore models and estimate relative binding affinities. As a Python module with enhanced visualization features, DruGUI 2.0 complements, and benefits from, the vast collection of protein sequence, structure, and dynamics analyses modules accessible in ProDy. Case studies in the Supplemental Material showcase the utility of DruGUI 2.0 applied to both soluble targets and membrane proteins. Availability: ProDy is open-sourced and freely available under MIT License from https://github.com/prody/ProDy. The code version of DruGUI 2.0 used for simulations is available on Zenodo : 10.5281/zenodo.20511357.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105043868548
U2 - 10.1093/bioinformatics/btag429
DO - 10.1093/bioinformatics/btag429
M3 - Article
C2 - 42340669
AN - SCOPUS:105043868548
SN - 1367-4803
VL - 42
JO - Bioinformatics
JF - Bioinformatics
IS - 7
M1 - btag429
ER -