Probabilistic prediction of contacts in protein-ligand complexes

We introduce a statistical method for evaluating atomic level 3D interaction patterns of protein-ligand contacts. Such patterns can be used for fast separation of likely ligand and ligand binding site combinations out of all those that are geometrically possible. The practical purpose of this probabilistic method is for molecular docking and scoring, as an essential part of a scoring function. Probabilities of interaction patterns are calculated conditional on structural x-ray data and predefined chemical classification of molecular fragment types. Spatial coordinates of atoms are modeled using a Bayesian statistical framework with parametric 3D probability densities. The parameters are given distributions a priori, which provides the possibility to update the densities of model parameters with new structural data and use the parameter estimates to create a contact hierarchy. The contact preferences can be defined for any spatial area around a specified type of fragment. We compared calculated contact point hierarchies with the number of contact atoms found near the contact point in a reference set of x-ray data, and found that these were in general in a close agreement. Additionally, using substrate binding site in cathechol-O-methyltransferase and 27 small potential binder molecules, it was demonstrated that these probabilities together with auxiliary parameters separate well ligands from decoys (true positive rate 0.75, false positive rate 0). A particularly useful feature of the proposed Bayesian framework is that it also characterizes predictive uncertainty in terms of probabilities, which have an intuitive interpretation from the applied perspective.