3DMolNavi: a web-based retrieval and navigation tool for flexible molecular shape comparison

Advances in the Development of Shape Similarity Methods and Their Application in Drug Discovery

Molecular similarity is a key concept in drug discovery. It is based on the assumption that structurally similar molecules frequently have similar properties. Assessment of similarity between small molecules has been highly effective in the discovery and development of various drugs. Especially, two-dimensional (2D) similarity approaches have been quite popular due to their simplicity, accuracy and efficiency. Recently, the focus has been shifted toward the development of methods involving the representation and comparison of three-dimensional (3D) conformation of small molecules. Among the 3D similarity methods, evaluation of shape similarity is now gaining attention for its application not only in virtual screening but also in molecular target prediction, drug repurposing and scaffold hopping. A wide range of methods have been developed to describe molecular shape and to determine the shape similarity between small molecules. The most widely used methods include atom distance-based methods, surface-based approaches such as spherical harmonics and 3D Zernike descriptors, atom-centered Gaussian overlay based representations. Several of these methods demonstrated excellent virtual screening performance not only retrospectively but also prospectively. In addition to methods assessing the similarity between small molecules, shape similarity approaches have been developed to compare shapes of protein structures and binding pockets. Additionally, shape comparisons between atomic models and 3D density maps allowed the fitting of atomic models into cryo-electron microscopy maps. This review aims to summarize the methodological advances in shape similarity assessment highlighting advantages, disadvantages and their application in drug discovery.

Mesh Generation and Flexible Shape Comparisons for Bio-Molecules

Novel approaches for generating and comparing flexible (non-rigid) molecular surface meshes are developed. The mesh-generating method is fast and memory-efficient. The resulting meshes are smooth and accurate, and possess high mesh quality. An isometric-invariant shape descriptor based on the Laplace- Beltrami operator is then explored for mesh comparing. The new shape descriptor is more powerful in discriminating different surface shapes but rely only on a small set of signature values. The shape descriptor is applied to shape comparison between molecules with deformed structures. The proposed methods are implemented into a program that can be used as a stand-alone software tool or as a plug-in to other existing molecular modeling tools. Particularly, the code is encapsulated into a software toolkit with a user-friendly graphical interface developed by the authors.

A local average distance descriptor for flexible protein structure comparison

BACKGROUND

Protein structures are flexible and often show conformational changes upon binding to other molecules to exert biological functions. As protein structures correlate with characteristic functions, structure comparison allows classification and prediction of proteins of undefined functions. However, most comparison methods treat proteins as rigid bodies and cannot retrieve similarities of proteins with large conformational changes effectively.

RESULTS

In this paper, we propose a novel descriptor, local average distance (LAD), based on either the geodesic distances (GDs) or Euclidean distances (EDs) for pairwise flexible protein structure comparison. The proposed method was compared with 7 structural alignment methods and 7 shape descriptors on two datasets comprising hinge bending motions from the MolMovDB, and the results have shown that our method outperformed all other methods regarding retrieving similar structures in terms of precision-recall curve, retrieval success rate, R-precision, mean average precision and F1-measure.

CONCLUSIONS

Both ED- and GD-based LAD descriptors are effective to search deformed structures and overcome the problems of self-connection caused by a large bending motion. We have also demonstrated that the ED-based LAD is more robust than the GD-based descriptor. The proposed algorithm provides an alternative approach for blasting structure database, discovering previously unknown conformational relationships, and reorganizing protein structure classification.