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Updated: Sep 30, 2025

Incorporating Target Protein Structure Flexibility and Dynamics in Computational Drug Discovery Using Ensemble-Based Docking Analysis
Published on: June 20, 2025
FitDock: protein-ligand docking by template fitting
Xiaocong Yang1, Yang Liu1, Jianhong Gan1
1Center of Growth, Metabolism and Aging, Key Laboratory of Bio-Resource and Eco-Environment of Ministry of Education, College of Life Sciences, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China.
Abstract:
Protein-ligand docking is an essential method in computer-aided drug design and structural bioinformatics. It can be used to identify active compounds and reveal molecular mechanisms of biological processes. A successful docking usually requires thorough conformation sampling and scoring, which are computationally expensive and difficult. Recent studies demonstrated that it can be beneficial to docking with the guidance of existing similar co-crystal structures. In this work, we developed a protein-ligand docking method, named FitDock, which fits initial conformation to the given template using a hierarchical multi-feature alignment approach, subsequently explores the possible conformations and finally outputs refined docking poses. In our comprehensive benchmark tests, FitDock showed 40%-60% improvement in terms of docking success rate and an order of magnitude faster over popular docking methods, if template structures exist (> 0.5 ligand similarity). FitDock has been implemented in a user-friendly program, which could serve as a convenient tool for drug design and molecular mechanism exploration. It is now freely available for academic users at http://cao.labshare.cn/fitdock/.
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