Two-stage method for protein-ligand docking

Efficient electrostatic solvation model for protein-fragment docking

A method is presented for the fast evaluation of the binding energy of a protein-small molecule complex with electrostatic solvation. It makes use of a fast preprocessing step based on the assumption that the main contribution to electrostatic desolvation upon ligand binding originates from the displacement of the first shell of water molecules. For a rigid protein, the precomputation of the energy contributions on a set of grids allows the estimation of the energy in solution of about 300 protein-fragment binding modes per second on a personal computer. The docking procedure is applied to five rigid binding sites whose size ranges from 17 residues to a whole protein of 107 amino acids. Using a library of 70 mainly rigid molecules, known micromolar inhibitors or close analogs are docked and prioritized correctly. The docking based rank-ordering of the library requires about 5 h and is proposed as a complementary approach to structure-activity relationships by nuclear magnetic resonance. Proteins 2001;42:256-268.

A method for including protein flexibility in protein-ligand docking: improving tools for database mining and virtual screening

Second-generation methods for docking ligands into their biological receptors, such as FLOG, provide for flexibility of the ligand but not of the receptor. Molecular dynamics based methods, such as free energy perturbation, account for flexibility, solvent effects, etc., but are very time consuming. We combined the use of statistical analysis of conformational samples from short-run protein molecular dynamics with grid-based docking protocols and demonstrated improved performance in two test cases. Our statistical analysis explores the importance of the average strength of a potential interaction with the biological target and optionally applies a weighting depending on the variability in the strength of the interaction seen during dynamics simulation. Using these methods, we improved the num-top-ranked 10% of a database of drug-like molecules, in searches based on the three-dimensional structure of the protein. These methods are able to match the ability of manual docking to assess likely inactivity on steric grounds and indeed to rank order ligands from a homologous series of cyclooxygenase-2 inhibitors with good correlation to their true activity. Furthermore, these methods reduce the need for human intervention in setting up molecular docking experiments.