High-throughput calculation of protein-ligand binding affinities: Modification and adaptation of the MM-PBSA protocol to enterprise grid computing

We have developed a system for performing computations on an enterprise grid using a freely available package for grid computing that allows us to harvest unused CPU cycles off of employee desktop computers. By modifying the traditional formulation of Molecular Mechanics with Poisson-Boltzmann Surface Area (MM-PBSA) methodology, in combination with a coarse-grain parallelized implementation suitable for deployment onto our enterprise grid, we show that it is possible to produce rapid physics-based estimates of protein-ligand binding affinities that have good correlation to experimental data. This is demonstrated by examining the correlation of our calculated binding affinities to experimental data and also by comparison to the correlation obtained from the binding-affinity calculations using traditional MM-PBSA that are reported in the literature.