The prediction of the quaternary structure of biomolecular macromolecules is of paramount importance for fundamental understanding of cellular processes and drug design. In the era of integrative structural biology, one way of increasing the accuracy of modeling methods used to predict the structure of biomolecular complexes is to include as much experimental or predictive information as possible in the process. This has been at the core of our information-driven docking approach HADDOCK. We present here the updated version 2.2 of the HADDOCK portal, which offers new features such as support for mixed molecule types, additional experimental restraints and improved protocols, all of this in a user-friendly interface. With well over 6000 registered users and 108,000 jobs served, an increasing fraction of which on grid resources, we hope that this timely upgrade will help the community to solve important biological questions and further advance the field. The HADDOCK2.2 Web server is freely accessible to non-profit users at http://haddock.science.uu.nl/services/HADDOCK2.2.
Summary: Gaining insights into the structural determinants of protein-protein interactions holds the key for a deeper understanding of biological functions, diseases and development of therapeutics. An important aspect of this is the ability to accurately predict the binding strength for a given protein-protein complex. Here we present PRODIGY, a web server to predict the binding affinity of protein-protein complexes from their three-dimensional structure. The PRODIGY server implements our simple but highly effective predictive model based on intermolecular contacts and properties derived from non-interface surface.
Computational docking is the prediction or modeling of the three-dimensional structure of a biomolecular complex, starting from the structures of the individual molecules in their free, unbound form. HADDOCK is a popular docking program that takes a data-driven approach to docking, with support for a wide range of experimental data. Here we present the HADDOCK web server protocol, facilitating the modeling of biomolecular complexes for a wide community. The main web interface is user-friendly, requiring only the structures of the individual components and a list of interacting residues as input. Additional web interfaces allow the more advanced user to exploit the full range of experimental data supported by HADDOCK and to customize the docking process. The HADDOCK server has access to the resources of a dedicated cluster and of the e-NMR GRID infrastructure. Therefore, a typical docking run takes only a few minutes to prepare and a few hours to complete.
28 July 2021 in Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences
Structural biology aims at characterizing the structural and dynamic properties of biological macromolecules at atomic details. Gaining insight into three dimensional structures of biomolecules and their interactions is critical for understanding the vast majority of cellular processes, with direct applications in health and food sciences. Since 2010, the WeNMR project (www.wenmr.eu) has implemented numerous web-based services to facilitate the use of advanced computational tools by researchers in the field, using the high throughput computing infrastructure provided by EGI. These services have been further developed in subsequent initiatives under H2020 projects and are now operating as Thematic Services in the European Open Science Cloud portal (www.eosc-portal.eu), sending >12 millions of jobs and using around 4,000 CPU-years per year. Here we review 10 years of successful e-infrastructure solutions serving a large worldwide community of over 23,000 users to date, providing them with user-friendly, web-based solutions that run complex workflows in structural biology. The current set of active WeNMR portals are described, together with the complex backend machinery that allows distributed computing resources to be harvested efficiently.