We are pleased to announce the publication of this paper, in the journal Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry.
Abstract
After decades of work, the correct determination of the binding mode of a small molecule into a target protein is still a challenging problem, whose difficulty depends on: (i) the sizes of the binding site and the ligand; (ii) the flexibility of both interacting partners, and (iii) the differential solvation of bound and unbound partners. We have evaluated the performance of standard rigid(receptor)/flexible(ligand) docking approaches with respect to last-generation fully flexible docking methods to obtain reasonable poses in a very challenging case: soluble Epoxide Hydrolase (sEH), a flexible protein showing different binding sites. We found that full description of the flexibility of both protein and ligand and accurate description of solvation leads to significant improvement in the ability of docking to reproduce well known binding modes, and at the same time capture the intrinsic binding promiscuity of the protein.
Citation
Martin Kotev, Robert Soliva, Modesto Orozco, Challenges of docking in large, flexible and promiscuous binding sites, Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry, Available online 6 August 2016, ISSN 0968-0896, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bmc.2016.08.010.
