@PHDTHESIS{ 2016:891568012,
 	title = {An effective method to optimize docking-based virtual screening in a clustered fully-flexible receptor model deployed on cloud platforms},
 	year = {2016},
 	url = "http://tede2.pucrs.br/tede2/handle/tede/7329",
 	abstract = "The use of conformations obtained from molecular dynamics trajectories in the molecular docking experiments is the most accurate approach to simulate the behavior of receptors and ligands in molecular environments. However, such simulations are computationally expensive and their execution may become an infeasible task due to the large number of structural information, typically considered to represent the explicit flexibility of receptors. In addition, the computational demand increases when Fully-Flexible Receptor (FFR) models are routinely applied for screening of large compounds libraries. This study presents a novel method to optimize docking-based virtual screening of FFR models by reducing the size of FFR models at docking runtime, and scaling docking workflow invocations out onto virtual machines from cloud platforms. For this purpose, we developed e-FReDock, a cloud-based scientific workflow that assists in faster high-throughput docking simulations of flexible receptors and ligands. e-FReDock is based on a free-parameter selective method to perform ensemble docking experiments with multiple ligands from a clustered FFR model.
 The e-FReDock input data was generated by applying six clustering methods for partitioning conformations with different features in their substrate-binding cavities, aiming at identifying groups of snapshots with favorable interactions for specific ligands at docking runtime. Experimental results show the high quality Reduced Fully-Flexible Receptor (RFFR) models achieved by e-FReDock in two distinct sets of analyses. The first analysis shows that e-FReDock is able to preserve the quality of the FFR model between 84.00% and 94.00%, while its dimensionality reduces on average 49.68%. The second analysis reports that resulting
 RFFR models are able to reach better docking results than those obtained from the rigid version of the FFR model in 97.00% of the ligands tested.",
 	publisher = {Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul},
 	scholl = {Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Computação},
 	note = {Faculdade de Informática}
}