Structural Protein–Ligand Interaction Fingerprints (SPLIF) for Structure-Based Virtual Screening: Method and Benchmark Study

Accurate and affordable assessment of ligand–protein affinity for structure-based virtual screening (SB-VS) is a standing challenge. Hence, empirical postdocking filters making use of various types of structure–activity information may prove useful. Here, we introduce one such filter based upon three-dimensional structural protein–ligand interaction fingerprints (SPLIF). SPLIF permits quantitative assessment of whether a docking pose interacts with the protein target similarly to a known ligand and rescues active compounds penalized by poor initial docking scores. An extensive benchmark study on 10 diverse data sets selected from the DUD-E database has been performed in order to evaluate the absolute and relative efficiency of this method. SPLIF demonstrated an overall better performance than relevant standard methods.