Soft protein-protein docking in internal coordinates

The association of two biological macromolecules is a fundamental biological phenomenon and an unsolved theoretical problem. Docking methods for ab initio prediction of association of two independently determined protein structures usually fail when they are applied to a large set of complexes, mostly because of inaccuracies in the scoring function and/or difficulties on simulating the rearrangement of the interface residues on binding. In this work we present an efficient pseudo-Brownian rigid-body docking procedure followed by Biased Probability Monte Carlo Minimization of the ligand interacting side-chains. The use of a soft interaction energy function precalculated on a grid, instead of the explicit energy, drastically increased the speed of the procedure. The method was tested on a benchmark of 24 protein-protein complexes in which the three-dimensional structures of their subunits (bound and free) were available. The rank of the near-native conformation in a list of candidate docking solutions was <20 in 85% of complexes with no major backbone motion on binding. Among them, as many as 7 out of 11 (64%) protease-inhibitor complexes can be successfully predicted as the highest rank conformations. The presented method can be further refined to include the binding site predictions and applied to the structures generated by the structural proteomics projects. All scripts are available on the Web.