Ligand-based virtual screening interface between PyMOL and LiSiCA

Ligand-based virtual screening of large small-molecule databases is an important step in the early stages of drug development. It is based on the similarity principle and is used to reduce the chemical space of large databases to a manageable size where chosen ligands can be experimentally tested. Ligand-based virtual screening can also be used to identify bioactive molecules with different basic scaffolds compared to already known bioactive molecules, thus having the potential to increase the structural variability of compounds. Here, we present an interface between the popular molecular graphics system PyMOL and the ligand-based virtual screening software LiSiCA available at http://insilab.org/lisica-plugin and demonstrate how this interface can be used in the early stages of drug discovery process. [Figure: see text]