Protein-protein docking using region-based 3D Zernike descriptors

Vishwesh Venkatraman, Yifeng D Yang, Lee Sael, Daisuke Kihara

Protein-protein interactions are a pivotal component of many biological processes and mediate a variety of functions. Knowing the tertiary structure of a protein complex is therefore essential for understanding the interaction mechanism. However, experimental techniques to solve the structure of the complex are often found to be difficult. To this end, computational protein-protein docking approaches can provide a useful alternative to address this issue. Prediction of docking conformations relies on methods that effectively capture shape features of the participating proteins while giving due consideration to conformational changes that may occur.