Development of methodologies for molecular docking and their applications

Virtual High Throughput Screening (vHTS) has an increasingly important role in lowering both costs and time in drug discovery. The present work deals with the development (C++ programming language) of a new molecular docking software (semi-flexible model) to be used for vHTS. It would improve some of the main aspects of this type of softwares in current use, with particular reference to the program AutoDock: a particular importance is given to the calculation of the ligand conformational energy variation in passing from the unbound to the bound state, which represents a crucial term in the docking energy definition. Two real cases to which the new software modules were applied are then presented: the first belonging to drug discovery, concerning the study of new Ras oncogenic protein inhibitors; the second belonging to virtual protein engineering (VPE), concerning the design of a modified enzyme to be used in the manufacturing of semisynthetic antibiotics.