Getting Docking into Shape Using Negative Image-Based Rescoring

The failure of default scoring functions to ensure virtual screening enrichment is a persistent problem for the molecular docking algorithms used in the structure-based drug discovery. To remedy this problem, elaborate rescoring and post-processing schemes have been developed with a varying degree of success, specificity, and cost. The negative imagebased rescoring (R-NiB) has been shown to improve the flexible docking performance markedly with a variety of drug targets.The yield improvement is achieved by comparing the alternative docking poses against the negative image of the target protein’s ligand-binding cavity. In other words, the shape and electrostatics of the binding pocket is directly used in the similarity comparison to rank the explicit docking poses. Here, the PANTHER/ShaEP-based R-NiB methodology is tested with six popular docking software, including GLIDE, PLANTS, GOLD, DOCK, AUTODOCK, and AUTODOCK VINA, using five validated benchmark sets. Overall, the results indicate that the R-NiB outperforms the default docking scoring consistently and inexpensively; i.e., demonstrating that the methodology is ready for wide-scale virtual screening usage.