Docking enzyme‐inhibitor complexes using a preference‐based free‐energy surface

We present a docking scheme that utilizes both a surface complementarity screen as well as an energetic criterion based on surface area burial. Twenty rigid enzyme/inhibitor complexes with known coordinate sets are arbitrarily separated and reassembled to an average all‐atom rms (root mean square) deviation of 1.0 Å from the native complexes. Docking is accomplished by a hierarchical search of geometrically compatible triplets of surface normals on each molecule. A pruned tree of possible bound configurations is built up using successive consideration of larger and larger triplets. The best scoring configurations are then passed through a free‐energy screen where the lowest energy member is selected as the predicted native state. The free energy approximation is derived from observations of surface burial by atom pairs across the interface of known enzyme/inhibitor complexes. The occurrence of specific atom‐atom surface burial, for a set of complexes with well‐defined secondary structure both in the bound and unbound states, is parameterized to mimic the free energy of binding. The docking procedure guides the inhibitor into its native state using orientation and distance‐dependent functions that reproduce the ideal model of free energies with an average rms deviation of 0.9 kcal/mol. For all systems studied, this docking procedure identifies a single, unique minimum energy configuration that is highly compatible with the native state. © 1996 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.