A new article by BU SBRP trainees Dmitri Beglov, Gwo-Yu Chuang, David Hall, and Bioinformatics Core PI Sandor Vajda has been published in Bioinformatics. The authors sought to develop computational methods to identify the most druggable pockets of target proteins. The location of these “hot spot” regions of proteins can be determined experimentally at considerable cost. The authors developed an algorithm that performs a global search of the entire protein surface for regions that bind a number of small organic probe molecules. Improving the efficiency of finding the most druggable pockets of target proteins and identifying molecular fragments or functional groups that tend to bind will have important benefits in the drug design process. The same technology is being used to identify protein sites that interact with known toxicophores and to determine the importance of such interactions with particular receptors.