A comparison of the pharmacophore identification programs: Catalyst, DISCO and GASP

Three commercially available pharmacophore generation programs, Catalyst/HipHop, DISCO and GASP, were compared on their ability to generate known pharmacophores deduced from protein-ligand complexes extracted from the Protein Data Bank. Five different protein families were included Thrombin, Cyclin Dependent Kinase 2, Dihydrofolate Reductase, HIV Reverse Transcriptase and Thermolysin. Target pharmacophores were defined through visual analysis of the data sets. The pharmacophore models produced were evaluated qualitatively through visual inspection and according to their ability to generate the target pharmacophores. Our results show that GASP and Catalyst outperformed DISCO at reproducing the five target pharmacophores.