VORFFIP-Driven Dock: V-D²OCK, a Fast and Accurate Protein Docking Strategy

The experimental determination of the structure of protein complexes cannot keep pace with the generation of interactomic data, hence resulting in an ever-expanding gap. As the structural details of protein complexes are central to a full understanding of the function and dynamics of the cell machinery, alternative strategies are needed to circumvent the bottleneck in structure determination. Computational protein docking is a valid and valuable approach to model the structure of protein complexes. In this work, we describe a novel computational strategy to predict the structure of protein complexes based on data-driven docking: VORFFIP-driven dock (V-D²OCK). This new approach makes use of our newly described method to predict functional sites in protein structures, VORFFIP, to define the region to be sampled during docking and structural clustering to reduce the number of models to be examined by users. V-D²OCK has been benchmarked using a validated and diverse set of protein complexes and compared to a state-of-art docking method. The speed and accuracy compared to contemporary tools justifies the potential use of VD²OCK for high-throughput, genome-wide, protein docking. Finally, we have developed a web interface that allows users to browser and visualize V-D²OCK predictions from the convenience of their web-browsers.