Abstract

The ability to predict ligand binding modes without the aid of wet-lab experiments may accelerate and reduce the cost of drug discovery research. Despite significant recent progress, virtual screening has not yet eliminated the need for wet-lab experiments. For example, after a lead compound has been identified, the precise binding mode is still typically determined by experimental structural biology. This structural knowledge is then employed to guide lead optimization. We present a step toward improving protein-ligand binding mode prediction for a set of ligands known to interact with a common protein. There is thus an important distinction between this work and traditional virtual screening algorithms. Whereas traditional approaches attempt to identify binding ligands from a large database of available compounds, our approach aims to more accurately predict the binding mode for a set of ligands which are already known to bind the target protein. The approach is based on the hypothesis that each active site contains a set of interaction points which binding ligands tend to exploit. In a more traditional context, these interaction points make up a pharmacophoric map. Our algorithm first performs traditional protein-ligand docking for each known binder. The ranked lists of candidate binding modes are then evaluated to identify a set of poses maximally self-consistent with respect to a pharmacophoric map generated from the same poses. We have extensively demonstrated the application of the algorithm to four protein systems (thrombin, cyclin-dependent kinase 2, dihydrofolate reductase, and HIV-1 protease) and attained predictions with an average RMSD < 2.5 A for all tested systems. This represents a typical improvement of 0.5-1.0 A (up to 25%) RMSD over the naive virtual docking predictions. Our algorithm is independent of the docking method and may significantly improve binding mode prediction of virtual docking experiments.