Abstract
The growing number of protein–ligand complex structures, particularly the structures of proteins co-bound with different ligands, in the Protein Data Bank helps us tackle two major challenges in molecular docking studies: the protein flexibility and the scoring function. Here, we introduced a systematic strategy by using the information embedded in the known protein–ligand complex structures to improve both binding mode and binding affinity predictions. Specifically, a ligand similarity calculation method was employed to search a receptor structure with a bound ligand sharing high similarity with the query ligand for the docking use. The strategy was applied to the two datasets (HSP90 and MAP4K4) in recent D3R Grand Challenge 2015. In addition, for the HSP90 dataset, a system-specific scoring function (ITScore2_hsp90) was generated by recalibrating our statistical potential-based scoring function (ITScore2) using the known protein–ligand complex structures and the statistical mechanics-based iterative method. For the HSP90 dataset, better performances were achieved for both binding mode and binding affinity predictions comparing with the original ITScore2 and with ensemble docking. For the MAP4K4 dataset, although there were only eight known protein–ligand complex structures, our docking strategy achieved a comparable performance with ensemble docking. Our method for receptor conformational selection and iterative method for the development of system-specific statistical potential-based scoring functions can be easily applied to other protein targets that have a number of protein–ligand complex structures available to improve predictions on binding.
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Acknowledgements
Support to XZ from OpenEye Scientific Software Inc. (Santa Fe, NM, http://www.eyesopen.com) is gratefully acknowledged. This work was supported by the NSF CAREER Award DBI-0953839, the NIH R01GM109980, and the American Heart Association (Midwest Affiliate) 13GRNT16990076 to XZ. The computations were performed on the high performance computing infrastructure supported by NSF CNS-1429294 (PI: Chi-Ren Shyu) and the HPC resources supported by the University of Missouri Bioinformatics Consortium (UMBC).
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Xu, X., Yan, C. & Zou, X. Improving binding mode and binding affinity predictions of docking by ligand-based search of protein conformations: evaluation in D3R grand challenge 2015. J Comput Aided Mol Des 31, 689–699 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10822-017-0038-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10822-017-0038-1