Glide

Glide, developed by Schrödinger, is the industry-leading ligand-receptor docking solution designed for structure-based drug discovery. It is trusted by pharmaceutical and biotechnology researchers to augment and accelerate drug design across a wide range of applications, including virtual screening, binding mode prediction, and interactive 3D molecular design.

Glide delivers reliable, high-accuracy docking for diverse receptor types — including small molecules, peptides, and macrocycles — and integrates seamlessly into modern virtual screening workflows. Its combination of speed, accuracy, and flexibility makes it a cornerstone tool for computational chemists and drug discovery teams working at any scale.

Key Advantages of Glide

• Easy-to-use graphical interface: A simple, guided graphical user interface allows researchers to easily create and validate docking models without extensive setup.
• High docking accuracy across diverse receptor types: Glide achieves high enrichment across a broad range of receptor types, including small molecules, peptides, and macrocycles.
• Customizable constraints: A broad range of constraints enables users to bias docking calculations to meet experimentally observed requirements and target desired chemical space.
• Explicit water energetics with Glide WS: Accurate pose predictions and elimination of false positive virtual hits are achieved by optionally leveraging explicit water dynamics through Glide WS.

Scoring Workflows

• Glide SP: A widely used and precise docking workflow designed for high-throughput virtual screens. Glide SP employs hierarchical filter technology ideal for large-scale screening, delivering fast and accurate hits.
• Glide WS: An advanced docking tool that leverages explicit water dynamics from WaterMap. Built on the foundation of Glide SP and WScore, Glide WS provides significantly improved sampling and scoring of small molecules within the binding pocket, helping to reduce false positives from Glide SP screenings.

Powerful Use Cases Across Drug Discovery

• Interactive 3D design: Interactively design and dock molecules in 3D using goal-directed ligand design workflows in Ligand Designer and LiveDesign.
• Pose prediction: Accurately predict ligand poses to understand interactions with the receptor and provide an initial pose for rescoring with AB FEP+.
• Virtual screening: Perform virtual screens with automated, customizable workflows, and accelerate screening of ultra-large libraries containing more than one billion compounds using Glide enhanced by Active Learning.
• Covalent docking and scoring: Dock ligands that bind covalently to the receptor using predefined or custom reaction chemistry via CovDock.
• Rescoring with Glide WS: Incorporate detailed water analysis from WaterMap calculations to evaluate protein-ligand binding interactions and reduce false positives identified in Glide SP screenings.

Access to Prepared Commercial Libraries

• Schrödinger has partnered with leading compound library providers to offer fully prepared commercial databases for use with Glide.
• Available libraries span fragments, lead-like, near drug-like, and drug-like compounds, ranging from millions to billions of compounds and encompassing a vast chemical space.

Tutorials and Documentation

• Structure-based virtual screening using Glide, including receptor grid preparation and docked pose analysis.
• Small molecule–oligonucleotide docking with Glide, covering receptor grid generation and co-crystal ligand docking.
• Ligand binding pose generation for FEP+ simulations using core constrained docking.
• Re-scoring docked ligands with MM-GBSA to optimize binding poses.
• Approximating protein flexibility without molecular dynamics by softening potentials and running induced-fit docking.
• Refining crystallographic protein-ligand structures using GlideXtal and Phenix/OPLS.

Glide integrates with a broad ecosystem of Schrödinger technologies, including FEP+, WaterMap, LiveDesign, Active Learning Applications, and Prepared Commercial Libraries, enabling end-to-end structure-based drug discovery pipelines. Training resources including online certification courses, tutorials, quick start guides, and documentation are available to support researchers in deploying Glide effectively for their projects.