Structural biology, protein conformations and drug designing

Structure based drug designing is now a popular technique used for increasing the speed of drug designing process. This was made possible by the availability of many protein structures which helped in developing tools to understand the structure function relationships, automated docking and virtual screening. Knowledge of structure based functional properties of a drug target is very essential for a successful in silico designing of drugs. However, some problems associated with the structure determination process and lack of knowledge of conformational freedom associated with available protein structures are the hurdles involved in structure based drug designing. Docking and virtual screening processes depend on the active site structure of the receptor molecule and subtle differences in the conformations of these molecules due to flexibility pose a serious threat to the drug designing process. In this review problems associated with the conformations of proteins and homology models was reviewed.