• Skip to main content

Shawna Thomas

Texas A&M University College of Engineering
  • Home
  • Research
  • Publications
  • Teaching
  • CV

Using Motion Planning to Rank Ligand Binding Affinity

Hsin-Yi (Cindy) Yeh, Shawna Thomas, Nancy M.~Amato,
ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Health Informatics (BCB), Atlanta, GA, USA, September 2015, Association for Computing Machinery: New York, NY, USA, pp. 529–530.

Abstract: In the drug discovery process, pharmaceutical companies have to screen many drug (or ligand) candidates to find the most promising ones for trial. This process is very costly and attention as turned to computational approaches to predict binding affinity to the desired target protein. In this work, we develop a computational tool for ranking ligand binding affinity that uniformly samples ligand conformations over the target protein’s surface and analyzes the resulting set to compute an affinity ranking. Experiments on one target protein shows that our method is able to correctly rank different ligands for the target protein as determined by experimental data. Our method is a promising technique and potential cost-saving tool for pharmaceutical companies to narrow the search for good drug candidate.

Research Pages:

  • Parallel Motion Planning
  • Modeling Protein Motion

© 2016–2025 Shawna Thomas Log in

Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station Logo
  • College of Engineering
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • State of Texas
  • Open Records
  • Risk, Fraud & Misconduct Hotline
  • Statewide Search
  • Site Links & Policies
  • Accommodations
  • Environmental Health, Safety & Security
  • Employment