Protein−Ligand Docking against Non-Native Protein Conformers

In the validation of protein−ligand docking protocols, performance is mostly measured against native protein conformers, i.e. each ligand is docked into the protein conformation from the structure that contained that ligand. In real-life applications, however, ligands are docked against non-native conformations of the protein, i.e. the apo structure or a structure of a different protein−ligand complex. Here, we have constructed an extensive test set for assessing docking performance against non-native protein conformations. This new test set is built on the Astex Diverse Set (which we recently constructed for assessing native docking performance) and contains 1112 non-native structures for 65 drug targets. Using the protein−ligand docking program GOLD, the Astex Diverse Set and the new Astex Non-native Set, we established that, whereas docking performance (top-ranked solution within 2 A rmsd of the experimental binding mode) is ∼80% for native docking, this drops to 61% for non-native docking. A similar d...