RESEARCH ARTICLE
Evaluation of Scoring Function Performance on DNA-ligand Complexes
Pedro Fong*, Hong-Kong Wong
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2019Volume: 13
First Page: 40
Last Page: 49
Publisher ID: TOMCJ-13-40
DOI: 10.2174/1874104501913010040
Article History:
Received Date: 15/02/2019Revision Received Date: 12/05/2019
Acceptance Date: 22/05/2019
Electronic publication date: 31/07/2019
Collection year: 2019
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Background:
DNA has been a pharmacological target for different types of treatment, such as antibiotics and chemotherapy agents, and is still a potential target in many drug discovery processes. However, most docking and scoring approaches were parameterised for protein-ligand interactions; their suitability for modelling DNA-ligand interactions is uncertain.
Objective:
This study investigated the performance of four scoring functions on DNA-ligand complexes.
Material & Methods:
Here, we explored the ability of four docking protocols and scoring functions to discriminate the native pose of 33 DNA-ligand complexes over a compiled set of 200 decoys for each DNA-ligand complexes. The four approaches were the AutoDock, ASP@GOLD, ChemScore@GOLD and GoldScore@GOLD.
Results:
Our results indicate that AutoDock performed the best when predicting binding mode and that ChemScore@GOLD achieved the best discriminative power. Rescoring of AutoDock-generated decoys with ChemScore@GOLD further enhanced their individual discriminative powers. All four approaches have no discriminative power in some DNA-ligand complexes, including both minor groove binders and intercalators.
Conclusion:
This study suggests that the evaluation for each DNA-ligand complex should be performed in order to obtain meaningful results for any drug discovery processes. Rescoring with different scoring functions can improve discriminative power.