one amino acid has different interactions than another with an external ligand, the surface topography of the binding site may change. These interactions and their effects can be studied using computational docking. A different effect of a point mutation is a conformational change resulting from an amino change. The latter can be investigated with AlphaFold (without the ligand) and also to what extent the structural backbone in space changes, if at all. On top of these 2, there can be a protein conformational change brought about by the ligand attachment to the site and minimization techniques and long MD simulations sampling protein conformations can analyze that.