Hotspots API: A Python Package for the Detection of Small Molecule Binding Hotspots and Application to Structure-Based Drug Design.

Methods that survey protein surfaces for binding hotspots can help to evaluate target tractability and guide exploration of potential ligand binding regions. Fragment Hotspot Maps builds upon interaction data mined from the CSD (Cambridge Structural Database) and exploits the idea of identifying hotspots using small chemical fragments, which is now widely used to design new drug leads. Prior to this publication, Fragment Hotspot Maps was only publicly available through a web application. To increase the accessibility of this algorithm we present the Hotspots API (application programming interface), a toolkit that offers programmatic access to the core Fragment Hotspot Maps algorithm, thereby facilitating the interpretation and application of the analysis. To demonstrate the package's utility, we present a workflow which automatically derives protein hydrogen-bond constraints for molecular docking with GOLD. The Hotspots API is available from https://github.com/prcurran/hotspots under the MIT license and is dependent upon the commercial CSD Python API.

New software for statistical analysis of Cambridge Structural Database data.

A collection of new software tools is presented for the analysis of geometrical, chemical and crystallographic data from the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD). This software supersedes the program Vista. The new functionality is integrated into the program Mercury in order to provide statistical, charting and plotting options alongside three-dimensional structural visualization and analysis. The integration also permits immediate access to other information about specific CSD entries through the Mercury framework, a common requirement in CSD data analyses. In addition, the new software includes a range of more advanced features focused towards structural analysis such as principal components analysis, cone-angle correction in hydrogen-bond analyses and the ability to deal with topological symmetry that may be exhibited in molecular search fragments.