EasyMIFS and SiteHound: a toolkit for the identification of ligand-binding sites in protein structures.

Abstract

SiteHound uses Molecular Interaction Fields (MIFs) produced by EasyMIFs to identify protein structure regions that show a high propensity for interaction with ligands. The type of binding site identified depends on the probe atom used in the MIF calculation. The input to EasyMIFs is a PDB file of a protein structure; the output MIF serves as input to SiteHound, which in turn produces a list of putative binding sites. Extensive testing of SiteHound for the detection of binding sites for drug-like molecules and phosphorylated ligands has been carried out. EasyMIFs and SiteHound executables for Linux, Mac OS X, and MS Windows operating systems are freely available for download from http://sitehound.sanchezlab.org/download.html. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.