Using RosettaLigand for Small Molecule Docking into Comparative Models

Computational small molecule docking into comparative models of proteins is widely used to query protein function and in the development of small molecule therapeutics. We benchmark RosettaLigand docking into comparative models for nine proteins built during CASP8 that contain ligands. We supplement the study with 21 additional protein/ligand complexes to cover a wider space of chemotypes. During a full docking run in 21 of the 30 cases, RosettaLigand successfully found a native-like binding mode among the top ten scoring binding modes. From the benchmark cases we find that careful template selection based on ligand occupancy provides the best chance of success while overall sequence identity between template and target do not appear to improve results. We also find that binding energy normalized by atom number is often less than -0.4 in native-like binding modes.