SDOVS: a solvent dipole ordering-based method for virtual screening

We previously reported that solvent dipole ordering (SDO) at the ligand binding site of a protein indicates an outline of the preferred shape and binding pose of the ligands. We suggested that SDO-mimetic pseudo-molecules that mimic the 3D shape of the SDO region could be used as molecular queries with a shape similarity matching method in virtual screening. In this work, a virtual screening method based on SDO, named SDOVS, was proposed. This method was applied to virtual screening of ligands for four typical drug target proteins and the performance compared with that of FRED (well-known rigid docking method); the efficiency of SDOVS was demonstrated to be better than FRED.