Discovery Studio 1.5 from Accelrys is a new Life Sciences software package. It allows standard protein modeling and simulations and incorporates docking capabilities as well. An X-ray crystallography package has also been included, but most users would want a dedicated X-ray crystallography package. DS1.5 is the next generation package and is a combination of features from DS1.1 and DS1.2. It is much more user friendly in that it plugs directly into the windows structure for data storage, rather than using an Oracle database. Unfortunately some usability seems to have been lost, for example it is now not possible to modify your own minimization/molecular dynamics calculations.

In terms of runtime, the new version is an improvement over the old, however many bugs still remain. As this is still a young program, only recently ported from a Linux platform (Insight II), this is not unexpected. I recommend not wasting time attempting to port your data from 1.1 or 1.2, as most of the information is not compatible with the new version. Only structures and data tables can be converted. For new users I would recommend trying other software such as Sybyl from Tripos, now up to version 7.2. This software package has very few bugs and is much more reliable.