Correcting the impact of docking pose generation error on binding affinity prediction

International audienceAbstractBackgroundPose generation error is usually quantified as the difference between the geometry of the pose generated by the docking software and that of the same molecule co-crystallised with the considered protein. Surprisingly, the impact of this error on binding affinity prediction is yet to be systematically analysed across diverse protein-ligand complexes.ResultsAgainst commonly-held views, we have found that pose generation error has generally a small impact on the accuracy of binding affinity prediction. This is also true for large pose generation errors and it is not only observed with machine-learning scoring functions, but also with classical scoring functions such as AutoDock Vina. Furthermore, we propose a procedure to correct a substantial part of this error which consists of calibrating the scoring functions with re-docked, rather than co-crystallised, poses. In this way, the relationship between Vina-generated protein-ligand poses and their binding affinities is directly learned. As a result, test set performance after this error-correcting procedure is much closer to that of predicting the binding affinity in the absence of pose generation error (i.e. on crystal structures). We evaluated several strategies, obtaining better results for those using a single docked pose per ligand than those using multiple docked poses per ligand.ConclusionsBinding affinity prediction is often carried out on the docked pose of a known binder rather than its co-crystallised pose. Our results suggest than pose generation error is in general far less damaging for binding affinity prediction than it is currently believed. Another contribution of our study is the proposal of a procedure that largely corrects for this error. The resulting machine-learning scoring function is freely available at http://istar.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/rf-score-4.tgzand http://ballester.marseille.inserm.fr/rf-score-4.tgz

Computational structure‐based drug design: Predicting target flexibility

The role of molecular modeling in drug design has experienced a significant revamp in the last decade. The increase in computational resources and molecular models, along with software developments, is finally introducing a competitive advantage in early phases of drug discovery. Medium and small companies with strong focus on computational chemistry are being created, some of them having introduced important leads in drug design pipelines. An important source for this success is the extraordinary development of faster and more efficient techniques for describing flexibility in three‐dimensional structural molecular modeling. At different levels, from docking techniques to atomistic molecular dynamics, conformational sampling between receptor and drug results in improved predictions, such as screening enrichment, discovery of transient cavities, etc. In this review article we perform an extensive analysis of these modeling techniques, dividing them into high and low throughput, and emphasizing in their application to drug design studies. We finalize the review with a section describing our Monte Carlo method, PELE, recently highlighted as an outstanding advance in an international blind competition and industrial benchmarks.We acknowledge the BSC-CRG-IRB Joint Research Program in Computational Biology. This work was supported by a grant from the Spanish Government CTQ2016-79138-R.J.I. acknowledges support from SVP-2014-068797, awarded by the Spanish Government.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Quantitative surface field analysis: learning causal models to predict ligand binding affinity and pose.

We introduce the QuanSA method for inducing physically meaningful field-based models of ligand binding pockets based on structure-activity data alone. The method is closely related to the QMOD approach, substituting a learned scoring field for a pocket constructed of molecular fragments. The problem of mutual ligand alignment is addressed in a general way, and optimal model parameters and ligand poses are identified through multiple-instance machine learning. We provide algorithmic details along with performance results on sixteen structure-activity data sets covering many pharmaceutically relevant targets. In particular, we show how models initially induced from small data sets can extrapolatively identify potent new ligands with novel underlying scaffolds with very high specificity. Further, we show that combining predictions from QuanSA models with those from physics-based simulation approaches is synergistic. QuanSA predictions yield binding affinities, explicit estimates of ligand strain, associated ligand pose families, and estimates of structural novelty and confidence. The method is applicable for fine-grained lead optimization as well as potent new lead identification

Representability of algebraic topology for biomolecules in machine learning based scoring and virtual screening

This work introduces a number of algebraic topology approaches, such as multicomponent persistent homology, multi-level persistent homology and electrostatic persistence for the representation, characterization, and description of small molecules and biomolecular complexes. Multicomponent persistent homology retains critical chemical and biological information during the topological simplification of biomolecular geometric complexity. Multi-level persistent homology enables a tailored topological description of inter- and/or intra-molecular interactions of interest. Electrostatic persistence incorporates partial charge information into topological invariants. These topological methods are paired with Wasserstein distance to characterize similarities between molecules and are further integrated with a variety of machine learning algorithms, including k-nearest neighbors, ensemble of trees, and deep convolutional neural networks, to manifest their descriptive and predictive powers for chemical and biological problems. Extensive numerical experiments involving more than 4,000 protein-ligand complexes from the PDBBind database and near 100,000 ligands and decoys in the DUD database are performed to test respectively the scoring power and the virtual screening power of the proposed topological approaches. It is demonstrated that the present approaches outperform the modern machine learning based methods in protein-ligand binding affinity predictions and ligand-decoy discrimination