Publications (18) View all
-
Article: Development and validation of an improved algorithm for overlaying flexible molecules.
[show abstract] [hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: A program for overlaying multiple flexible molecules has been developed. Candidate overlays are generated by a novel fingerprint algorithm, scored on three objective functions (union volume, hydrogen-bond match, and hydrophobic match), and ranked by constrained Pareto ranking. A diverse subset of the best ranked solutions is chosen using an overlay-dissimilarity metric. If necessary, the solutions can be optimised. A multi-objective genetic algorithm can be used to find additional overlays with a given mapping of chemical features but different ligand conformations. The fingerprint algorithm may also be used to produce constrained overlays, in which user-specified chemical groups are forced to be superimposed. The program has been tested on several sets of ligands, for each of which the true overlay is known from protein-ligand crystal structures. Both objective and subjective success criteria indicate that good results are obtained on the majority of these sets.Journal of Computer-Aided Molecular Design 04/2012; 26(4):451-72. · 3.39 Impact Factor -
Article: Potential and limitations of ensemble docking.
[show abstract] [hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: A major problem in structure-based virtual screening applications is the appropriate selection of a single or even multiple protein structures to be used in the virtual screening process. A priori it is unknown which protein structure(s) will perform best in a virtual screening experiment. We investigated the performance of ensemble docking, as a function of ensemble size, for eight targets of pharmaceutical interest. Starting from single protein structure docking results, for each ensemble size up to 500,000 combinations of protein structures were generated, and, for each ensemble, pose prediction and virtual screening results were derived. Comparison of single to multiple protein structure results suggests improvements when looking at the performance of the worst and the average over all single protein structures to the performance of the worst and average over all protein ensembles of size two or greater, respectively. We identified several key factors affecting ensemble docking performance, including the sampling accuracy of the docking algorithm, the choice of the scoring function, and the similarity of database ligands to the cocrystallized ligands of ligand-bound protein structures in an ensemble. Due to these factors, the prospective selection of optimum ensembles is a challenging task, shown by a reassessment of published ensemble selection protocols.Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling 04/2012; 52(5):1262-74. · 4.68 Impact Factor -
Article: Pose prediction and virtual screening performance of GOLD scoring functions in a standardized test.
[show abstract] [hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: The performance of all four GOLD scoring functions has been evaluated for pose prediction and virtual screening under the standardized conditions of the comparative docking and scoring experiment reported in this Edition. Excellent pose prediction and good virtual screening performance was demonstrated using unmodified protein models and default parameter settings. The best performing scoring function for both pose prediction and virtual screening was demonstrated to be the recently introduced scoring function ChemPLP. We conclude that existing docking programs already perform close to optimally in the cognate pose prediction experiments currently carried out and that more stringent pose prediction tests should be used in the future. These should employ cross-docking sets. Evaluation of virtual screening performance remains problematic and much remains to be done to improve the usefulness of publically available active and decoy sets for virtual screening. Finally we suggest that, for certain target/scoring function combinations, good enrichment may sometimes be a consequence of 2D property recognition rather than a modelling of the correct 3D interactions.Journal of Computer-Aided Molecular Design 02/2012; 26(6):737-48. · 3.39 Impact Factor -
Article: Are predefined decoy sets of ligand poses able to quantify scoring function accuracy?
[show abstract] [hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: Due to the large number of different docking programs and scoring functions available, researchers are faced with the problem of selecting the most suitable one when starting a structure-based drug discovery project. To guide the decision process, several studies comparing different docking and scoring approaches have been published. In the context of comparing scoring function performance, it is common practice to use a predefined, computer-generated set of ligand poses (decoys) and to reevaluate their score using the set of scoring functions to be compared. But are predefined decoy sets able to unambiguously evaluate and rank different scoring functions with respect to pose prediction performance? This question arose when the pose prediction performance of our piecewise linear potential derived scoring functions (Korb et al. in J Chem Inf Model 49:84-96, 2009) was assessed on a standard decoy set (Cheng et al. in J Chem Inf Model 49:1079-1093, 2009). While they showed excellent pose identification performance when they were used for rescoring of the predefined decoy conformations, a pronounced degradation in performance could be observed when they were directly applied in docking calculations using the same test set. This implies that on a discrete set of ligand poses only the rescoring performance can be evaluated. For comparing the pose prediction performance in a more rigorous manner, the search space of each scoring function has to be sampled extensively as done in the docking calculations performed here. We were able to identify relative strengths and weaknesses of three scoring functions (ChemPLP, GoldScore, and Astex Statistical Potential) by analyzing the performance for subsets of the complexes grouped by different properties of the active site. However, reasons for the overall poor performance of all three functions on this test set compared to other test sets of similar size could not be identified.Journal of Computer-Aided Molecular Design 02/2012; 26(2):185-97. · 3.39 Impact Factor -
Article: The ensemble performance index: an improved measure for assessing ensemble pose prediction performance.
[show abstract] [hide abstract]
ABSTRACT: We present a theoretical study on the performance of ensemble docking methodologies considering multiple protein structures. We perform a theoretical analysis of pose prediction experiments which is completely unbiased, as we make no assumptions about specific scoring functions, search paradigms, protein structures, or ligand data sets. We introduce a novel interpretable measure, the ensemble performance index (EPI), for the assessment of scoring performance in ensemble docking, which will be applied to simulated and real data sets.Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling 10/2011; 51(11):2915-9. · 4.68 Impact Factor
