# InsiliCoil: An Integrated Software Suite for Coiled Coil Design, Prediction, and Therapeutic Engineering

## TL;DR

InsiliCoil is a software suite that helps design and predict coiled coil proteins for synthetic biology and drug discovery.

## Contribution

InsiliCoil introduces a unified platform for coiled coil design, inhibitor discovery, and interactome engineering with high throughput and accuracy.

## Key findings

- InsiliCoil reliably recovers validated coiled coil inhibitors and interactomes.
- The software offers faster throughput than structure-based approaches.
- It supports various utilities like heptad detection and large-scale visualization.

## Abstract

Helical protein–protein interactions underpin
transcriptional
regulation, signal transduction, and self-assembly, yet their rational
design remains challenging. Coiled coils (CCs) are particularly attractive
as modular, programmable building blocks in synthetic biology, while
also serving as therapeutic targets. Here we present InsiliCoil, a cross-platform software suite that unifies predictive modeling,
selective peptide inhibitor discovery, and orthogonal interactome
design into a single accessible framework. At its core, isCAN enables high-throughput identification of selective CC inhibitors,
while CCIS systematically constructs orthogonal CC networks
for synthetic biological circuits and biomaterials. Additional utilities
support automatic heptad detection, heptad scanning, constraint analysis,
charge block prediction, library generation, and large-scale visualization.
Benchmarking against experimental data sets confirms that InsiliCoil
reliably recovers validated inhibitors and interactomes, while offering
orders-of-magnitude faster throughput than structure-based approaches.
By providing a cohesive, user-friendly platform for controlling helix-mediated
PPIs, InsiliCoil accelerates both therapeutic discovery and the rational
engineering of programmable biological systems.