Refinement Methods for Protein Docking based on Exploring Multi-Dimensional Energy Funnels

Sponsor: National Science Foundation (NSF)

Award Number: 1-R01-GM093147-01

Abstract:

All successful state-of-the-art protein docking methods employ a so called multistage approach. At the first stage of such approaches a rough energy potential is used to score billions of conformations. At a second stage, thousands of conformations with the best scores are retained and clustered based on a certain similarity metric. Cluster centers correspond to putative predictions/models. Recent work by the proposing team demonstrated that greater prediction quality can be achieved by properly exploring these clusters through a process called refinement. This work resulted in the development of a prototype refinement approach – the Semi-Definite programming-based Underestimation method (SDU).

A novelty of the proposed work is in its use of sophisticated machinery from the fields of optimization and decision theory specially tailored to the biophysical properties of the docking problem. Techniques from convex and combinatorial optimization, machine learning, and Markov random fields are brought to bear on the refinement stage of multistage protein docking approaches. An important element of the work is the systematic characterization of multi-dimensional binding energy funnels. The existence of such funnels has been long conjectured but it has not led to new docking approaches so far. The proposed algorithms essentially achieve this goal by devising efficient strategies to identify, characterize, and explore these funnels.

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