UNLABELLED: Computational solvent mapping finds binding hot spots, determines their druggability and provides information for drug design. While mapping of a ligand-bound structure yields more accurate results, usually the apo structure serves as the starting point in design. The FTFlex algorithm, implemented as a server, can modify an apo structure to yield mapping results that are similar to those of the respective bound structure. Thus, FTFlex is an extension of our FTMap server, which only considers rigid structures. FTFlex identifies flexible residues within the binding site and determines alternative conformations using a rotamer library. In cases where the mapping results of the apo structure were in poor agreement with those of the bound structure, FTFlex was able to yield a modified apo structure, which lead to improved FTMap results. In cases where the mapping results of the apo and bound structures were in good agreement, no new structure was predicted. AVAILABILITY: FTFlex is freely available as a web-based server at http://ftflex.bu.edu/.

MOTIVATION: An effective docking algorithm for antibody-protein antigen complex prediction is an important first step toward design of biologics and vaccines. We have recently developed a new class of knowledge-based interaction potentials called Decoys as the Reference State (DARS) and incorporated DARS into the docking program PIPER based on the fast Fourier transform correlation approach. Although PIPER was the best performer in the latest rounds of the CAPRI protein docking experiment, it is much less accurate for docking antibody-protein antigen pairs than other types of complexes, in spite of incorporating sequence-based information on the location of the paratope. Analysis of antibody-protein antigen complexes has revealed an inherent asymmetry within these interfaces. Specifically, phenylalanine, tryptophan and tyrosine residues highly populate the paratope of the antibody but not the epitope of the antigen. RESULTS: Since this asymmetry cannot be adequately modeled using a symmetric pairwise potential, we have removed the usual assumption of symmetry. Interaction statistics were extracted from antibody-protein complexes under the assumption that a particular atom on the antibody is different from the same atom on the antigen protein. The use of the new potential significantly improves the performance of docking for antibody-protein antigen complexes, even without any sequence information on the location of the paratope. We note that the asymmetric potential captures the effects of the multi-body interactions inherent to the complex environment in the antibody-protein antigen interface. AVAILABILITY: The method is implemented in the ClusPro protein docking server, available at http://cluspro.bu.edu.

MOTIVATION: Binding site identification is a classical problem that is important for a range of applications, including the structure-based prediction of function, the elucidation of functional relationships among proteins, protein engineering and drug design. We describe an accurate method of binding site identification, namely FTSite. This method is based on experimental evidence that ligand binding sites also bind small organic molecules of various shapes and polarity. The FTSite algorithm does not rely on any evolutionary or statistical information, but achieves near experimental accuracy: it is capable of identifying the binding sites in over 94% of apo proteins from established test sets that have been used to evaluate many other binding site prediction methods. AVAILABILITY: FTSite is freely available as a web-based server at http://ftsite.bu.edu.

Shingled magnetic recording is a promising technology to increase the capacity of hard-disk drives with no significant cost impact. Its main drawback is that random-write access to the disk is restricted due to overlap in the layout of data tracks. For computing and storage systems to enjoy the increased capacity, it is necessary to mitigate these access restrictions, and present a storage device that serves unrestricted read/write requests with adequate performance. This paper proposes two different indirection systems to mask access restrictions and optimize performance. The first one is a diskcache based architecture that provides unrestricted access with manageable drop in performance. A second, more complex indirection system, utilizes a new storage unit called S-block. It is shown that the S-block architecture allows good sustained random-write performance, a point where the disk-cache architecture fails. The organization and algorithms of both architectures are specified in detail. Each was implemented and simulated as a discrete-event simulation, mimicking its operation on real storage devices. For the performance evaluation both synthetic workloads and traces from real workloads were used.

MOTIVATION: The binding sites of proteins generally contain smaller regions that provide major contributions to the binding free energy and hence are the prime targets in drug design. Screening libraries of fragment-sized compounds by NMR or X-ray crystallography demonstrates that such 'hot spot' regions bind a large variety of small organic molecules, and that a relatively high 'hit rate' is predictive of target sites that are likely to bind drug-like ligands with high affinity. Our goal is to determine the 'hot spots' computationally rather than experimentally. RESULTS: We have developed the FTMAP algorithm that performs global search of the entire protein surface for regions that bind a number of small organic probe molecules. The search is based on the extremely efficient fast Fourier transform (FFT) correlation approach which can sample billions of probe positions on dense translational and rotational grids, but can use only sums of correlation functions for scoring and hence is generally restricted to very simple energy expressions. The novelty of FTMAP is that we were able to incorporate and represent on grids a detailed energy expression, resulting in a very accurate identification of low-energy probe clusters. Overlapping clusters of different probes are defined as consensus sites (CSs). We show that the largest CS is generally located at the most important subsite of the protein binding site, and the nearby smaller CSs identify other important subsites. Mapping results are presented for elastase whose structure has been solved in aqueous solutions of eight organic solvents, and we show that FTMAP provides very similar information. The second application is to renin, a long-standing pharmaceutical target for the treatment of hypertension, and we show that the major CSs trace out the shape of the first approved renin inhibitor, aliskiren. AVAILABILITY: FTMAP is available as a server at http://ftmap.bu.edu/.