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Updated: Jul 19, 2026

A Protocol for Computer-Based Protein Structure and Function Prediction
Published on: November 3, 2011
LIGSITEcsc: predicting ligand binding sites using the Connolly surface and degree of conservation
Bingding Huang1, Michael Schroeder
1Bioinformatics Group, Biotechnological Center, Technical University Dresden, Germany. bingding.huang@biotec.tu-dresden.de
Background:
Identifying pockets on protein surfaces is of great importance for many structure-based drug design applications and protein-ligand docking algorithms. Over the last ten years, many geometric methods for the prediction of ligand-binding sites have been developed.
Results:
We present LIGSITEcsc, an extension and implementation of the LIGSITE algorithm. LIGSITEcsc is based on the notion of surface-solvent-surface events and the degree of conservation of the involved surface residues. We compare our algorithm to four other approaches, LIGSITE, CAST, PASS, and SURFNET, and evaluate all on a dataset of 48 unbound/bound structures and 210 bound-structures. LIGSITEcsc performs slightly better than the other tools and achieves a success rate of 71% and 75%, respectively.
Conclusion:
The use of the Connolly surface leads to slight improvements, the prediction re-ranking by conservation to significant improvements of the binding site predictions. A web server for LIGSITEcsc and its source code is available at scoppi.biotec.tu-dresden.de/pocket
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