Virtual Screening: A Fast Tool for Drug Design

Computational screening of databases has become increasingly popular in the pharmaceutical research. Virtual screening uses computer based methods to discover new ligands on the basis of biological structures. Virtual screening is divided into structural based screening (docking) and screening using active compounds as templates (ligand based virtual screening). Ligand based screening techniques mainly focus on comparing molecular similarity analyses of compounds with known and unknown moiety, regardless of the methods of the used algorithm. Docking is a computational tool of structure based drug design to predict protein ligand interaction geometries and binding affinities. In this review we provide an overview of the already used ligand based virtual screening and the docking with various databases, filters, scores and applications in the recent research in the pharmaceutical field.