Recently, cyclic peptides have been considered breakthrough drugs because they can interact with “undruggable” targets such as intracellular protein–protein interactions. Membrane permeability is an essential indicator of oral bioavailability and intracellular targeting, and the development of membrane-permeable peptides is a bottleneck in cyclic peptide drug discovery. Although many experimental data on membrane permeability of cyclic peptides have been reported, a comprehensive database is not yet available. A comprehensive membrane permeability database is essential for developing computational methods for cyclic peptide drug design. In this study, we constructed CycPeptMPDB, the first web-accessible database of cyclic peptide membrane permeability. We collected information on a total of 7334 cyclic peptides, including the structure and experimentally measured membrane permeability, from 45 published papers and 2 patents from pharmaceutical companies. To unambiguously represent cyclic peptides larger than small molecules, we used the hierarchical editing language for macromolecules notation to generate a uniform sequence representation of peptides. In addition to data storage, CycPeptMPDB provides several supporting functions such as online data visualization, data analysis, and downloading. CycPeptMPDB is expected to be a valuable platform to support membrane permeability research on cyclic peptides. CycPeptMPDB can be freely accessed at http://cycpeptmpdb.com.

DNA sequences are translated into protein coding sequences and then further assigned to protein families in metagenomic analyses, because of the need for sensitivity. However, huge amounts of sequence data create the problem that even general homology search analyses using BLASTX become difficult in terms of computational cost. We designed a new homology search algorithm that finds seed sequences based on the suffix arrays of a query and a database, and have implemented it as GHOSTX. GHOSTX achieved approximately 131–165 times acceleration over a BLASTX search at similar levels of sensitivity. GHOSTX is distributed under the BSD 2-clause license and is available for download at http://www.bi.cs.titech.ac.jp/ghostx/. Currently, sequencing technology continues to improve, and sequencers are increasingly producing larger and larger quantities of data. This explosion of sequence data makes computational analysis with contemporary tools more difficult. We offer this tool as a potential solution to this problem.

Summary: The application of protein–protein docking in large-scale interactome analysis is a major challenge in structural bioinformatics and requires huge computing resources. In this work, we present MEGADOCK 4.0, an FFT-based docking software that makes extensive use of recent heterogeneous supercomputers and shows powerful, scalable performance of >97% strong scaling. Availability and Implementation: MEGADOCK 4.0 is written in C++ with OpenMPI and NVIDIA CUDA 5.0 (or later) and is freely available to all academic and non-profit users at: http://www.bi.cs.titech.ac.jp/megadock . Contact:akiyama@cs.titech.ac.jp Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online