Molecular dynamics simulations approaches for discovering anti-influenza drug

The emergence of influenza virus and antigenic drift are potential cause of world-wide pandemic. There are some commercially available drugs in the market to treat influenza. During past decade, however, critical resistances have been raised for biological targets. Because of structural complexity and flexibility of target proteins, applying a computational modeling tool is very beneficial for developing alternative anti-influenza drugs. In this review, we introduced molecular dynamics (MD) simulations approach to reflect full conformational flexibility of proteins during molecular modeling works. Case studies of MD works were summarized for the drug discovery and drug resistance mechanism of anti-influenza pharmaceuticals.