0.9 Protein-ligand docking, including flexible receptor-flexible  (Page 5/9)

Scoring function

FlexX uses a variant of the SCORE1 scoring function developed by Hans-Joachim Boehm for the de novo enzyme inhibitor design package LUDI. The scoring function has the following form:

Where f is a penalty function for deviations from ideal geometry for each kind of interaction, and f* is a function penalizing for lipophilic interactions deviating from an ideal separation distance.

Dock

The Dock home page

Dock 1.0, first described in 1982 [8] , was the first automated receptor-ligand docking program. It was developed in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California at San Francisco. Dock 4.0, the current version, was released in 1997 [9] .

Search technique

Like FlexX, Dock is driven by the geometry of the ligand and active site. The program approximates the shape of the binding cavity of the receptor with spheres. It then attempts to match the ligand to some subset of the centers of these spheres. Early versions used geometric hashing (see this module, covering local alignment methods ) to perform this matching, but more recent versions use bipartite graph matching (version 3.5) and single graph matching (version 4.0) for improved speed.

Scoring function

Dock offers three scoring functions. The first is based on an approximation to the Lennard-Jones potential (Van der Waals interactions). This essentially enforces geometric alignment and shape constraints. The second uses the program DELPHI to calculate the electrostatic potential of the complex.The third calculates the energy of the complex under the AMBER force field.

Links

• HotDock, a human-guided docking program
• Bio.com, a clearinghouse of the latest information about the bio-tech industry
• Babel, a program to convert between most common molecular file formats
• Software developed by the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics group at UIUC and the Beckman Institute. Includes NAMD, a molecular dynamics simulator, and VMD, a molecule visualizer.
• Protein Explorer (Rasmol), a simple molecule visualizer.

Flexible receptor docking

Introduction

As previously mentioned, docking entails determining not only the identity and three dimensional structure of the bound ligand, but also how the binding process affects the conformation of the receptor. This section will review the different receptor flexibility representations that have been proposed to study receptor conformational changes in the context of structure based drug design.

A central paradigm which was used in the development of the first docking programs was the lock-and-key model first described by Fischer [10] . In this model the three dimensional structure of the ligand and the receptor complement each other in the same way that a lock complements a key. However, further work confirmed that the lock-and-key model is not the most correct description for ligand binding. A more accurate view of this process was first presented by Koshland [11] in the induced fit model. In this model the three dimensional structure of the ligand and the receptor adapt to each other during the binding process. It is important to note that not only the structure of the ligand but also the structure of the receptor changes during the binding process. This occurs because the introduction of a ligand modifies the chemical and structural environment of the receptor. As a result, the unbound protein conformational substates, corresponding to the low energy regions of the protein energy landscape are likely to change. The induced fit model is supported by multiple observations in different proteins such as streptavidin, HIV-1 protease, DHFR, aldose reductase and many others.