title: 3D-Garden: a system for modelling protein-protein complexes based on conformational refinement of ensembles generated with the marching cubes algorithm.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Reliable structural modelling of protein-protein complexes has widespread application, from drug design to advancing our knowledge of protein interactions and function. This work addresses three important issues in protein-protein docking: implementing backbone flexibility, incorporating prior indications from experiment and bioinformatics, and providing public access via a server. 3D-Garden (Global And Restrained Docking Exploration Nexus), our benchmarked and server-ready flexible docking system, allows sophisticated programming of surface patches by the user via a facet representation of the interactors' molecular surfaces (generated with the marching cubes algorithm). Flexibility is implemented as a weighted exhaustive conformer search for each clashing pair of molecular branches in a set of 5000 models filtered from around approximately 340,000 initially.
  
  
  RESULTS
  In a non-global assessment, carried out strictly according to the protocols for number of models considered and model quality of the Critical Assessment of Protein Interactions (CAPRI) experiment, over the widely-used Benchmark 2.0 of 84 complexes, 3D-Garden identifies a set of ten models containing an acceptable or better model in 29/45 test cases, including one with large conformational change. In 19/45 cases an acceptable or better model is ranked first or second out of 340,000 candidates.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  http://www.sbg.bio.ic.ac.uk/3dgarden (server).
authors.affiliation: Division of Molecular Biosciences, Imperial College London, South Kensington, London SW72AZ, UK. v.lesk@ic.ac.uk
authors.forename: Victor I
authors.initials: VI
authors.lastname: Lesk
authors.forename: Michael J E
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Sternberg
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D001665:Binding Sites; D003198:Computer Simulation; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods; D008956:Models, Chemical; D008958:Models, Molecular; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D011485:Protein Binding; D011487:Protein Conformation; D025941:Protein Interaction Mapping / Q000379:methods*; D020539:Sequence Analysis, Protein / Q000379:methods*; D012984:Software