Rigid-Docking Approaches to Explore Protein-Protein Interaction Space

Protein-protein interactions play core roles in living cells, especially in the regulatory systems. As information on proteins has rapidly accumulated on publicly available databases, much effort has been made to obtain a better picture of protein-protein interaction networks using protein tertiary structure data. Predicting relevant interacting partners from their tertiary structure is a challenging task and computer science methods have the potential to assist with this. Protein-protein rigid docking has been utilized by several projects, docking-based approaches having the advantages that they can suggest binding poses of predicted binding partners which would help in understanding the interaction mechanisms and that comparing docking results of both non-binders and binders can lead to understanding the specificity of protein-protein interactions from structural viewpoints. In this review we focus on explaining current computational prediction methods to predict pairwise direct protein-protein interactions that form protein complexes.