NanoShaperWeb: Molecular Surface and Pocket Detection Made Visual

Analyzing molecular surfaces to predict functional sites and identify protein cavities for small molecule binding is essential in structural biology and drug discovery, particularly when targeting allosteric sites or designing PROTACs. Moreover, measuring properties like volume, surface area, and pockets' chemical descriptors helps in understanding protein function and improving drug development. Over the past decades, numerous surface and pocket-detection tools have been developed. While these tools provide valuable insights, they often require extensive postprocessing of text output files, making the analysis workflow cumbersome. To address this limitation, we introduce NanoShaperWeb, a web server that not only provides the computational capabilities of NanoShaper but also eliminates the need for manual text file processing through an intuitive web-based interface. Molecular surface and pocket-detection computations are performed remotely via a queue, with results visualized interactively and available for download. The application also delivers for each pocket DrugPred descriptors, enabling deeper insights into pocket features. By streamlining molecular analysis, this tool offers an efficient and accessible platform for researchers, supporting key stages of the drug design pipeline. The NanoShaperWeb tool is freely accessible online at https://nanoshaperweb.iit.it/ with no required registration.