Mapping the ligand binding landscape

The interaction between a ligand and a protein involves a multitude of conformational states. To achieve a particular deeply-bound pose the ligand must search across a rough free energy landscape, with many metastable minima. Creating maps of the ligand binding landscape is a great challenge, as binding and release events typically occur on timescales that are beyond the reach of molecular simulation. The WExplore enhanced sampling method is well-suited to build these maps, as it is designed to broadly explore free-energy landscapes, and is capable of simulating ligand release pathways that occur on timescales as long as minutes.

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