Sublinear ligand-based virtual screening using bitmap indices

Abstract

The contemporary standard approach for ligand-based virtual screening is based on a sequential screening pipeline which means that every compound of a given compound library has to be screened against a reference molecule. For tools based on small molecule alignments, this requires calculating superpositions between a reference ligand and each compound of the library to obtain a list of hit compounds.As calculating molecular superpositions is computationally expensive, our new tool for ligand-based virtual screening named TrixS BMI tries to avoid the sequential screening pipeline of other ligand-based virtual screening tools by reducing the number of compounds to superimpose in a computationally much faster pre-processing step. This allows for sublinear runtimes with respect to the library size while still providing comparable enrichment and hit rates. TrixS BMI is an adaptation of the structurebased virtual screening tool TrixX BMI [1] and uses an approach based on descriptors containing pharmacophoric and shape information, as well as an indexed database. In addition, TrixS BMI allows user-defined pharmacophoric constraints and has a novel approach to handle partial shape similarity directly upon the indexed search process.An outline of the workflow can be described as follows: as TrixS BMI does not decompose the compounds into smaller fragments, flexibility is handled by using a conformer generator, which calculates conformational ensembles for each compound of a given library. The ensembles are used to calculate descriptors, which are then stored in an indexed database. This is a one time effort. The same database is queried by descriptors calculated from a target molecule, which results in a preselection of compounds for the process of superpositioning.