RESIDUE CONSERVATION INFORMATION FOR GENERATING NEAR-NATIVE STRUCTURES IN PROTEIN–PROTEIN DOCKING

摘要

Motivation: Protein–protein docking algorithms typically generate large numbers of possible complex structures with only a few of them resembling the native structure. Recently (Duan et al., Protein Sci, 14:316–218, 2005), it was observed that the surface density of conserved residue positions is high at the interface regions of interacting protein surfaces, except for antibody–antigen complexes, where a lesser number of conserved positions than average is observed at the interface regions. Using this observation, we identified putative interacting regions on the surface of interacting partners and significantly improved docking results by assigning top ranks to near-native complex structures. In this paper, we combine the residue conservation information with a widely used shape complementarity algorithm to generate candidate complex structures with a higher percentage of near-native structures (hits). What is new in this work is that the conservation information is used early in the generation stage and not only in the ranking stage of the docking algorithm. This results in a significantly larger number of generated hits and an improved predictive ability in identifying the native structure of protein–protein complexes.