A unified conformational selection and induced fit approach to protein-peptide docking

PLoS One. 2013;8(3):e58769. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0058769. Epub 2013 Mar 13.

Abstract

Protein-peptide interactions are vital for the cell. They mediate, inhibit or serve as structural components in nearly 40% of all macromolecular interactions, and are often associated with diseases, making them interesting leads for protein drug design. In recent years, large-scale technologies have enabled exhaustive studies on the peptide recognition preferences for a number of peptide-binding domain families. Yet, the paucity of data regarding their molecular binding mechanisms together with their inherent flexibility makes the structural prediction of protein-peptide interactions very challenging. This leaves flexible docking as one of the few amenable computational techniques to model these complexes. We present here an ensemble, flexible protein-peptide docking protocol that combines conformational selection and induced fit mechanisms. Starting from an ensemble of three peptide conformations (extended, a-helix, polyproline-II), flexible docking with HADDOCK generates 79.4% of high quality models for bound/unbound and 69.4% for unbound/unbound docking when tested against the largest protein-peptide complexes benchmark dataset available to date. Conformational selection at the rigid-body docking stage successfully recovers the most relevant conformation for a given protein-peptide complex and the subsequent flexible refinement further improves the interface by up to 4.5 Å interface RMSD. Cluster-based scoring of the models results in a selection of near-native solutions in the top three for ∼75% of the successfully predicted cases. This unified conformational selection and induced fit approach to protein-peptide docking should open the route to the modeling of challenging systems such as disorder-order transitions taking place upon binding, significantly expanding the applicability limit of biomolecular interaction modeling by docking.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Benchmarking
  • Cluster Analysis
  • Databases, Protein
  • Molecular Docking Simulation*
  • Peptides / chemistry*
  • Peptides / metabolism*
  • Protein Binding
  • Protein Conformation
  • Proteins / chemistry*
  • Proteins / metabolism*
  • Substrate Specificity

Substances

  • Peptides
  • Proteins

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (www.nwo.nl) (VICI grant 700.56.442 to A.M.J.J.B.) and the WeNMR project (European FP7 e-Infrastructure grant, contract no. 261572, www.wenmr.eu). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.