From machine learning to deep learning: Advances in scoring functions for protein-ligand docking

Molecule docking has been regarded as a routine tool for drug discovery, but its accuracy highly depends on the reliability of scoring functions (SFs). With the rapid development of machine learning (ML) techniques, ML-based SFs have gradually emerged as a promising alternative for protein-ligand binding affinity prediction and virtual screening, and most of them have shown significantly better performance than a wide range of classical SFs. Emergence of more data-hungry deep learning (DL) approaches in recent years further fascinates the exploitation of more accurate SFs. Here, we summarize the progress of traditional ML-based SFs in the last few years and provide insights into recently developed DL-based SFs. We believe that the continuous improvement in ML-based SFs can surely guide the early-stage drug design and accelerate the discovery of new drugs. This article is categorized under: Computer and Information Science > Chemoinformatics