Title:SAnDReS a Computational Tool for Statistical Analysis of Docking Results and Development of Scoring Functions
Volume: 19
Issue: 10
Author(s): Mariana Morrone Xavier, Gabriela Sehnem Heck, Mauricio Boff de Avila, Nayara Maria Bernhardt Levin, Val Oliveira Pintro, Nathalia Lemes Carvalho and Walter Filgueira de Azevedo
Affiliation:
Keywords:
Dock, protein, target, drug, machine learning.
Abstract: Background: Docking allows to predict ligand binding to proteins, since the
3D-structure for the target is available. Several docking studies have been carried out to
identify potential ligands for drug targets. Many of these studies resulted in the leads
that were later developed as drugs.
Objective: Our goal here is to describe the development of an integrated computational
tool to assess docking accuracy and build new scoring functions to predict ligandbinding
affinity.
Method: We carried out docking simulations using MVD program for a data set
available on CSAR 2014 database (coagulation factor Xa) for which ligand-binding
information and structures are available. These docking results were analyzed using SAnDReS available at
www.sandres.net. Machine learning methods were applied to build new scoring functions and our results
were compared with previously published benchmarks.
Results: Our integrated docking strategy generated poses with docking accuracy higher than previously
published benchmarks. In addition, the new scoring function developed using SAnDReS shows better
performance than well-established scoring functions such the ones available in Autodock, Autodock-
Vina, Gold, Glide, and MVD.
Conclusion: The big data generated during docking lacked an integrated computational tool for
statistical analysis of the influence of structural parameters on docking and scoring function
performance. Here we describe methods to evaluate docking results using SAnDReS, a computational
environment for statistical analysis of docking results and development of scoring functions. We
believe that SAnDReS is a computational tool with potential to improve accuracy in docking projects.
