SnapDock-template-based docking by Geometric Hashing

Motivation: A highly efficient template-based protein-protein docking algorithm, nicknamed SnapDock, is presented. It employs a Geometric Hashing-based structural alignment scheme to align the target proteins to the interfaces of non-redundant protein-protein interface libraries. Docking of a pair of proteins utilizing the 22 600 interface PIFACE library is performed in < 2 min on the average. A flexible version of the algorithm allowing hinge motion in one of the proteins is presented as well. Results: To evaluate the performance of the algorithm a blind re-modelling of 3547 PDB complexes, which have been uploaded after the PIFACE publication has been performed with success ratio of about 35%. Interestingly, a similar experiment with the template free PatchDock docking algorithm yielded a success rate of about 23% with roughly 1/3 of the solutions different from those of SnapDock. Consequently, the combination of the two methods gave a 42% success ratio.