Evaluation of ligand-binding affinity using polynomial empirical scoring functions

Assessing protein-ligand interaction is of great importance for virtual screening initiatives in order to discover new drugs. The present work describes a set of empirical scoring functions to assess the binding affinity, involving terms for intermolecular hydrogen bonds and contact surface. The results show that our methodology works better to predict protein-ligand affinity when compared with XSCORE, a popular empirical scoring function. (c) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.