Abstract
Structure-based computational methods have been widely used in exploring protein-ligand interactions, including predicting the binding ligands of a given protein based on their structural complementarity. Compared to other protein and ligand representations, the advantages of a surface representation include reduced sensitivity to subtle changes in the pocket and ligand conformation and fast search speed. Here we developed a novel method named PL-PatchSurfer (Protein-Ligand PatchSurfer). PL-PatchSurfer represents the protein binding pocket and the ligand molecular surface as a combination of segmented surface patches. Each patch is characterized by its geometrical shape and the electrostatic potential, which are represented using the 3D Zernike descriptor (3DZD). We first tested PL-PatchSurfer on binding ligand prediction and found it outperformed the pocket-similarity based ligand prediction program. We then optimized the search algorithm of PL-PatchSurfer using the PDBbind dataset. Finally, we explored the utility of applying PL-PatchSurfer to a larger and more diverse dataset and showed that PL-PatchSurfer was able to provide a high early enrichment for most of the targets. To the best of our knowledge, PL-PatchSurfer is the first surface patch-based method that treats ligand complementarity at protein binding sites. We believe that using a surface patch approach to better understand protein-ligand interactions has the potential to significantly enhance the design of new ligands for a wide array of drug-targets.
Keywords
PL-PatchSurfer; surface patch; ligand prediction; virtual screening; 3D Zernike descriptor
Date of this Version
8-27-2014
DOI
10.3390/ijms150915122
Recommended Citation
Hu, B.; Zhu, X.; Monroe, L.; Bures, M.G.; Kihara, D. PL-PatchSurfer: A Novel Molecular Local Surface-Based Method for Exploring Protein-Ligand Interactions. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2014, 15, 15122-15145.
Comments
This is a PDF of Hu, B.; Zhu, X.; Monroe, L.; Bures, M.G.; Kihara, D. PL-PatchSurfer: A Novel Molecular Local Surface-Based Method for Exploring Protein-Ligand Interactions. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2014, 15, 15122-15145. DOI: 10.3390/ijms150915122, published by MDPI AG, Basel, Switzerland. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).