Colab Examples

Google Colaboratory (Colab) is a cloud-based platform that allows users to write and execute Python codes through a browser. Regardless of the user’s operating system, Colab provides Linux computing backends and some free GPU access.

The following Colab examples are created to provide an install-free experience & some generalizable workflows of AutoDock Vina via Google Colab notebooks, which work in a similar manner to Jupyter Notebooks, in the pre-configured environment with Meeko for receptor and ligand preparation, and other modules - RDKit, Scrubber, ProDy, reduce2 (formerly reduce), and py3Dmol - for conformer generation, manipulation & pre-processing of protein structures and visualization.

Subscription is NOT required to run these Colab examples. Additionally, the input files for the docking calculations are either directly pulled from open databases or generated from user inputs. With that, one can easily customize the notebooks and reuse the workflow for similar calculations on different biochemical systems.

Overview

General Workflow of Docking Calculations in Examples

docking workflow

Major Python packages used

Data

Basic docking

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The basic docking example is a rewrite based on the original basic docking example. In this example, a small molecule ligand (Imatinib, PDB token STI) is docked back to a hollow protein structure of mouse c-Abl (PDB token 1IEP) to reproduce the complex structure. A docked pose that closely resembles the original position of the ligand is expected among the top-ranked poses.

Flexible docking

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The flexible docking example is a rewrite based on the original flexible docking example. In this example, a variant of Imatinib (PDB token PRC) is docked back to a hollow protein structure of mouse c-Abl (PDB token 1FPU) to reproduce the complex structure. Additionally, Thr315 is set to be a flexible residue. A docked pose that closely resembles the original position of the ligand and a flipped Thr315 are expected among the top-ranked poses.

Using AD4SF in Vina

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The using AutoDock4 (AD4) scoring function (SF) example is a rewrite based on the corresponding part of the original basic docking example. This example conducts the same redocking experiment as in Basic docking with the AutoDock4 scoring function instead of Vina. To do this, Autogrid4 is used to compute the grid maps, as an additional step after receptor preparation.