Virtual Screening for RNA-Interacting Small Molecules [chapter]

Hyun-Ju Park, So-Jung Park
2012 Biophysical approaches to translational control of gene expression  
Computational virtual screening strategy is useful in the very early stage of the drug discovery pipeline and provides a powerful tool for rapid discovery of small biologically active molecules. Such strategy can decrease the number of candidate compounds providing a good starting point for chemical synthesis and biological screening. Therefore, in many cases, virtual screening can be used prior to expensive experimental highthroughput screening. For this reason, since the terms of
more » ... virtual screening came out in the late 1990s, it has been considered as a novel and essential technology in drug discovery. Ligand-and structure-based virtual screenings have been successfully applied to drug discovery programs in various disease areas. After prospective results for various protein targets were obtained, the utility of virtual screening to identify compounds for nucleic acidbased receptors has been the focus of much attention. Many computational docking programs that can automatically dock small molecules into a binding site of a target receptor with minimum input from an operator have been developed and their applicability has been proven (McInnes 2007 ) . In addition, the development of various free or commercially available databases allows for easy use of virtual screening. Each year, many successful cases of virtual screening against various targets including protein and nucleotides have been reported in several major review papers (Whitty and
doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-3991-2_12 fatcat:kde2gk4effcyvd6xlfe4r37bfm