Hits
You'll see a lot of discussion in the forum about "hits". Here is a brief explanation:

When a conformation docks successfully and triggers a positive interaction with the protein, it registers as a "hit". These hits are what this research hinges on. Any one hit may be the one that will ultimately lead to a cure. All hits are all recorded, ranked as to strength, and filed for the next stage of the project.



Do all proteins yield hits? The answer is No. Not all work units will produce hits - which is why we are doing this. If the scientists knew in advance exactly which protein target/molecule combinations would produce positive interactions we would not be here running this software.

So why are so many people concerned with hits? They don't add to WU points, and a no-hit WU result is just as valuable as a 700 hit WU result. But we're human, and we want to think that all that crunching is having some results, so we like to see those hits.

Just because a hit was found doesn't mean that molecule can be used - all the hit/no-hit molecules will be further studied to find why some have binding site preferences while similar molecules may not - what we're basically doing is the grunt work of classifying different molecule structures into hit/no-hit groups, the most time-consuming, calculation-intensive part of the research.

And once again, a completed WU with no hits is just as valuable as a WU with many hits.
This entry is a compilation of posts by Ian Brooks and MRK and was suggested by hockeyfun1 .

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by KeysCapt
last modified: 2002-11-17 12:29:06