Hello everyone :) I've been trying to learn methods/techniques related to CADD for the past 5-6 months, I'm actually looking for help to understand the molecular dynamics protocol for a protein-ligand complex, I've checked the online tutorials, to some extend they explain how to run such simulations but (unfortunately) not much about making sense of the results, I'm from a life science background so computation is still a bit confusing for me, as a background, here is a layout of my work:
- I searched for natural compounds that are similar to a drug (Y) that inhibits my enzyme (X)
- I performed molecular docking and I established that there is a potential affinity between X and Y
- Now I want to validate my docking results using molecular dynamics so I learned how to use namd/vmd which (OMG) took ages but I have passed all the errors and now I'm able to perform basic/standard md runs, I have the outputs as .dcd .coor .log .xcs ... , the simulation I performed involved 25k minimization (nvt) and 100K md run.
I've checked some tutorials online but (to the best of my knowledge) couldn't find a complete protocol explaining how to check the stability of the protein-ligand compound or finding their free binding energies to compare or any meaningful analysis that could serve as a validation (or disproof) of my docking results. Some suggested to perform a md on the ligand alone and compare the results to the protein-ligand one, it made logical sense but I couldn't figure how to do that, any suggestions both theoretical or (preferably) computational/practical would help me a lot, thanks in advance, stay safe :)