Ligand Identification Scoring Algorithm (LISA)

A central problem in de novo drug design is determining the binding affinity of a ligand with a receptor. A new scoring algorithm is presented that estimates the binding affinity of a protein-ligand complex given a three-dimensional structure. The method, LISA (Ligand Identification Scoring Algorithm), uses an empirical scoring function to describe the binding free energy. Interaction terms have been designed to account for van der Waals (VDW) contacts, hydrogen bonding, desolvation effects, and metal chelation to model the dissociation equilibrium constants using a linear model. Atom types have been introduced to differentiate the parameters for VDW, H-bonding interactions, and metal chelation between different atom pairs. A training set of 492 protein-ligand complexes was selected for the fitting process. Different test sets have been examined to evaluate its ability to predict experimentally measured binding affinities. By comparing with other well-known scoring functions, the results show that LISA has advantages over many existing scoring functions in simulating protein ligand binding affinity, especially metalloprotein-ligand binding affinity. Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was also used in order to demonstrate that the energy terms in LISA are well designed and do not require extra cross terms.