CaFE: a tool for binding affinity prediction using end-point free energy methods

Accurate prediction of binding free energy is of particular importance to computational biology and structure-based drug design. Among those methods for binding affinity predictions, the end-point approaches, such as MM/PBSA and LIE, have been widely used because they can achieve a good balance between prediction accuracy and computational cost. Here we present an easy-to-use pipeline tool named Calculation of Free Energy (CaFE) to conduct MM/PBSA and LIE calculations. Powered by the VMD and NAMD programs, CaFE is able to handle numerous static coordinate and molecular dynamics trajectory file formats generated by different molecular simulation packages and supports various force field parameters. Availability and implementation: CaFE source code and documentation are freely available under the GNU General Public License via GitHub at https://github.com/huiliucode/cafe_plugin. It is a VMD plugin written in Tcl and the usage is platform-independent.