HDOCK: a web server for protein–protein and protein–DNA/RNA docking based on a hybrid strategy

Protein–protein and protein–DNA/RNA interactions play a fundamental role in a variety of biological processes. Determining the complex structures of these interactions is valuable, in which molecular docking has played an important role. To automatically make use of the binding information from the PDB in docking, here we have presented HDOCK, a novel web server of our hybrid docking algorithm of template-based modeling and free docking, in which cases with misleading templates can be rescued by the free docking protocol. The server supports protein–protein and protein–DNA/RNA docking and accepts both sequence and structure inputs for proteins. The docking process is fast and consumes about 10–20 min for a docking run. Tested on the cases with weakly homologous complexes of <30% sequence identity from five docking benchmarks, the HDOCK pipeline tied with template-based modeling on the protein–protein and protein–DNA benchmarks and performed better than template-based modeling on the three protein–RNA benchmarks when the top 10 predictions were considered. The performance of HDOCK became better when more predictions were considered. Combining the results of HDOCK and template-based modeling by ranking first of the template-based model further improved the predictive power of the server. The HDOCK web server is available at http://hdock.phys.hust.edu.cn/.