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Updated: Aug 20, 2026

Protein WISDOM: A Workbench for In silico De novo Design of BioMolecules
Published on: July 25, 2013
PLASS: protein-ligand affinity statistical score--a knowledge-based force-field model of interaction derived from the
V D Ozrin1, M V Subbotin, S M Nikitin
1Algodign LLC, Bolshaya Sadovaya 8, Moscow 123379, Russian Federation. Vladimir.Ozrin@Algodign.com
Abstract:
We have developed PLASS (Protein-Ligand Affinity Statistical Score), a pair-wise potential of mean-force for rapid estimation of the binding affinity of a ligand molecule to a protein active site. This scoring function is derived from the frequency of occurrence of atom-type pairs in crystallographic complexes taken from the Protein Data Bank (PDB). Statistical distributions are converted into distance-dependent contributions to the Gibbs free interaction energy for 10 atomic types using the Boltzmann hypothesis, with only one adjustable parameter. For a representative set of 72 protein-ligand structures, PLASS scores correlate well with the experimentally measured dissociation constants: a correlation coefficient R of 0.82 and RMS error of 2.0 kcal/mol. Such high accuracy results from our novel treatment of the volume correction term, which takes into account the inhomogeneous properties of the protein-ligand complexes. PLASS is able to rank reliably the affinity of complexes which have as much diversity as in the PDB.
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