A selective method for optimizing ensemble docking-based experiments on an InhA Fully-Flexible receptor model

BACKGROUND: In the rational drug design process, an ensemble of conformations obtained from a molecular dynamics simulation plays a crucial role in docking experiments. Some studies have found that Fully-Flexible Receptor (FFR) models predict realistic binding energy accurately and improve scoring to enhance selectiveness. At the same time, methods have been proposed to reduce the high computational costs involved in considering the explicit flexibility of proteins in receptor-ligand docking. This study introduces a novel method to optimize ensemble docking-based experiments by reducing the size of an InhA FFR model at docking runtime and scaling docking workflow invocations on cloud virtual machines. RESULTS: First, in order to find the most affordable cost-benefit pool of virtual machines, we evaluated the performance of the docking workflow invocations in different configurations of Azure instances. Second, we validated the gains obtained by the proposed method based on the quality of the Reduced Fully-Flexible Receptor (RFFR) models produced using AutoDock4.2. The analyses show that the proposed method reduced the model size by approximately 50% while covering at least 86% of the best docking results from the 74 ligands tested. Third, we tested our novel method using AutoDock Vina, a different docking software, and showed the positive accuracy achieved in the resulting RFFR models. Finally, our results demonstrated that the method proposed optimized ensemble docking experiments and is applicable to different docking software. In addition, it detected new binding modes, which would be unreachable if employing only the rigid structure used to generate the InhA FFR model. CONCLUSIONS: Our results showed that the selective method is a valuable strategy for optimizing ensemble docking-based experiments using different docking software. The RFFR models produced by discarding non-promising snapshots from the original model are accurately shaped for a larger number of ligands, and the elapsed time spent in the ensemble docking experiments are considerably reduced. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12859-018-2222-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.