Virtual Environment for Studying the Docking Interactions of Rigid Biomolecules with Haptics

Haptic technology facilitates user interaction with the virtual world via the sense of touch. In molecular docking, haptics enables the user to sense the interaction forces during the docking process. Here we describe a haptics-assisted interactive software tool, called Haptimol_RD, for the study of docking interactions. By utilizing GPU-accelerated proximity querying methods very large systems can now be studied. Methods for force scaling, multipoint collision response and haptic navigation are described that address force stability issues that are particular to the interactive docking of large systems. Thus, Haptimol_RD expands, for the first time, the use of interactive biomolecular haptics to the study of protein-protein interactions. Unlike existing approaches, Haptimol_RD is designed to run on relatively inexpensive consumer-level hardware and is freely available to the community.