It is possible to dock ligands to the entire protein in a single docking job ("blind docking")? I work with heme enzymes with less than 500 amino acids. I currently use Auto Dock 4.2. Do you recommend any other tools for this purpose?
Blind docking is introduced for the detection of possible binding sites and in silico solutions by using docking tools focus on the (supposed) primary binding region. Thus using receptor flexibility during docking; "blind-docking" analysis a short distance between grid points can be identified. It is used when one get exhaustive data reported on drug tries to be formulated. Blind docking system consists of a model of proteins and peptides and definition of the “fitness” as an energy-like property of a given protein–peptide
I agree with Prateek about the use of Autodock Vina due to its better performance when several runs (>100) are required. I would only add that you can try to search for close protein homologues and check whether they have already described binding sites where your proposed ligands can compete. Then, for the higher scores you may want to try to decrease your search space to improve your results. Finally, if you are aware or you expect your protein to show some degree of conformational change, you may want to try an ensemble-based approach as in Wassman CD et al, (2013) Nat Commun 4, 1407.