*3.9. Molecular Docking*

The molecular docking was performed to identify the interaction of the edG with heparan sulfate. To date, the crystal structure of the RSV G protein is not available. Hence, we have modelled the 3D structure of edG using in silico approach. The detail of the modelled structure of edG has been reported elsewhere in our previous investigation [69]. The chemical structure of heparan sulfate was downloaded from the PubChem database and converted into the pdbqt file using Open Babel software in PyRx. The bioinformatics tool PyRx, Discovery studio, and PyMOL software were used for docking and visualization [70,71] . The docking was structurally blind, where the compound was to be free in motion and search the protein binding sites. Out of nine docked orientations, we selected

the one having maximum binding affinity and minimum binding energy in the active site region.
