Comprehensive assessment of flexible-ligand docking algorithms: current effectiveness and challenges

Protein-ligand docking has been playing an important role in modern drug discovery. To model drug-target binding in real systems, a number of flexible-ligand docking algorithms with different sampling strategies and scoring methods have been subsequently developed over the past three decades, while rigid-ligand docking is still being used because of its compelling computational efficiency. Here, a comprehensive assessment has been conducted to investigate the effectiveness of flexible-ligand docking versus rigid-ligand docking for three representative docking algorithms (global optimization, incremental construction and multi-conformer docking) in virtual screening and pose prediction on the Directory of Useful Decoys. It was found that overall flexible-ligand docking did not achieve a statistically significant improvement in enrichments over rigid-ligand docking in virtual screening, but all docking programs significantly improved the success rates when considering ligand flexibility in pose prediction. The worse effectiveness of flexible-ligand docking in virtual screening than in pose prediction suggests that the challenges of current docking algorithms exist in ranking more than docking, although the use of flexible-ligand docking in virtual screening was justified by its better effectiveness for more flexible ligand in virtual screening. Challenges for scoring, including internal energy, charge polarization, entropy and flexibility, were investigated and discussed. An empirical way was also proposed to consider loss of ligand conformational entropy for virtual screening.