Developing science gateways for drug discovery in a grid environment
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Human-Computer Interaction, Distributed and Parallel Computing
- Keywords
- Virtual Screening, FlexScreen, Science gateways, Drug Discovery, High Performance Computing
- Copyright
- © 2015 Pérez-Sánchez et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. Developing science gateways for drug discovery in a grid environment. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1245v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1245v1
Abstract
Methods for in-silico screening of large databases of molecules increasingly complement and replace experimental techniques to discover novel compounds to combat diseases. As these techniques become more complex and computationally costly we are faced with an increasing problem to provide the research community of life-sciences with a convenient tool for high-throughput virtual screening (HTVS) on distributed computing resources. To this end, we recently integrated the biophysics-based drug screening program FlexScreen into a service applicable for large-scale parallel screening and reusable in the context of scientific workflows. Our implementation, based on Pipeline Pilot and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) provides an easy-to-use graphical user interface to construct complex workflows which can be executed on distributed computing resources, thus accelerating the throughput by several orders of magnitude.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ Computer Science for review.