Title: Flexible molecular docking: application of hybrid tabu-simplex optimisation

Authors: G. Khensous; B. Messabih; A. Chouarfia; B. Maigret

Addresses: Université des Sciences et de la technologie d'Oran, Mohamed Boudiaf, USTO-MB, BP 1505, El M'naouer, 31000, Oran, Algérie ' Université des Sciences et de la technologie d'Oran, Mohamed Boudiaf, USTO-MB, BP 1505, El M'naouer, 31000, Oran, Algérie ' Université des Sciences et de la technologie d'Oran, Mohamed Boudiaf, USTO-MB, BP 1505, El M'naouer, 31000, Oran, Algérie ' CNRS, LORIA, Campus scientifique, BP239 – 54506, Vandoeuvre-Les-Nancy Cedex, France

Abstract: In this paper, we present a molecular docking method to predict the optimal binding pose of a flexible ligand in a flexible protein-binding pocket. A tabu-simplex optimisation is used: the best tabu solutions are refined using the Nelder-Mead Simplex optimisation. Most docking methods use scoring functions to approximate the binding affinity between two molecular partners. In our application, the intra-molecular and inter-molecular energies are calculated explicitly from a classical molecular mechanics model, which includes polarisation terms. The variables of our optimisation problem are the ligand positions (Euler angles + translation vector), the ligand and the protein side chains dihedral angles instead of the Cartesian coordinates in order to reduce the problem dimensionality. While the genetic optimisation for ligand docking (GOLD) software is usually considered as a standard in molecular docking, our docking approach is illustrated on four protein/ligand complexes for which GOLD failed, suggesting that the proposed method is promising.

Keywords: drug design; metaheuristic optimisation; protein-ligand docking; simplex algorithm; TSA; tabu search algorithm.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCBDD.2019.098178

International Journal of Computational Biology and Drug Design, 2019 Vol.12 No.1, pp.34 - 53

Received: 13 Nov 2017
Accepted: 28 Feb 2018

Published online: 05 Mar 2019 *

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