Predicting Protein Interactions by Brownian Dynamics Simulations
Abstract:
We present a newly adapted Brownian Dynamics (BD) based protein docking method
for predicting native protein complexes.
The approach includes: global BD conformational sampling,
compact complex selection and local energy minimization.
In order to reduce the computational costs for energy evaluations,
a shell-based grid force field was developed to represent the receptor protein
and solvation effects.
The performance of this BD protein docking approach has been evaluated
on a test set of 24 crystal protein complexes.
Reproduction of experimental structures in the test set indicates
the adequate configuration sampling and accurate scoring of this BD protein
docking approach.
Furthermore, we have developed an approach to account the flexibility
of proteins, which has been successfully applied to reproduce
the experimental complex structure from two unbounded proteins.
These results indicate that this adapted BD protein docking approach
can be useful for the prediction of protein-protein interactions.