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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2014 Dec 19.
Published in final edited form as: Q Rev Biophys. 2012 May 9;45(3):301–343. doi: 10.1017/S0033583512000066

Table 3a.

Docking studies that included side-chain flexibility through rotamer libraries. Caveats for each method are similar in that flexibility of the side chains alone has limited success in describing receptor motion for most binding events and the implementation of a rotamer library limits the conformational space that can be sampled

Method Target Flexibility Results Author
Rotamer Library Trypsin, McPC 603 Rotameric states sampled for all side chains within 10 Å of binding site Limited by the lack of a solvation term
RMSD of closest structure to the bound pose from the crystal was 0.7 Å for trypsin, 0.8 Å for McPC 603; in neither case was the closest pose also the lowest energy structure
Did not recover a good correlation between binding energy and RMSD to crystal structure
Leach (1994)
SOFTSPOTS/PLASTIC Thymidylate synthase Identified variation based on structural comparison (or binding site analysis)
Disregarded polar residues
Retained hydrophobic residues and loops for potential adaptation
Subjected 3 residues to rotamer variation
Minimized docked pose
Minimized, remodeled complex achieved reasonable energy scores for two potent inhibitors
Found −51.5 kcal/mol for ligand BW1843U89 and −49.7 kcal/mol for CB3717 for cross-docking with side-chain flexibility
Found −32.8 kcal/mol for CB3717 and −44.7 kcal/mol for BW1843U89 with rigid docking
Scores from native docking were −56.5 kcal/mol for BW1843U89 and −52.9 kcal/mol for CB3717
Anderson et al. (2001)