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René Thomsen

Publications and source records attributed to René Thomsen.

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MolDock: a new technique for high-accuracy molecular docking.

In this article we introduce a molecular docking algorithm called MolDock. MolDock is based on a new heuristic search algorithm that combines differential evolution with a cavity prediction algorithm. The docking scoring function of MolDock is an extension of the piecewise linear potential (PLP) including new hydrogen bonding and electrostatic terms. To further improve docking accuracy, a re-ranking scoring function is introduced, which identifies the most promising docking solution from the solutions obtained by the docking algorithm. The docking accuracy of MolDock has been evaluated by docking flexible ligands to 77 protein targets. MolDock was able to identify the correct binding mode of 87% of the complexes. In comparison, the accuracy of Glide and Surflex is 82% and 75%, respectively. FlexX obtained 58% and GOLD 78% on subsets containing 76 and 55 cases, respectively.

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Flexible ligand docking using evolutionary algorithms: investigating the effects of variation operators and local search hybrids.

The docking of ligands to proteins can be formulated as a computational problem where the task is to find the most favorable energetic conformation among the large space of possible protein-ligand complexes. Stochastic search methods such as evolutionary algorithms (EAs) can be used to sample large search spaces effectively and is one of the commonly used methods for flexible ligand docking. During the last decade, several EAs using different variation operators have been introduced, such as the ones provided with the AutoDock program. In this paper we evaluate the performance of different EA settings such as choice of variation operators, population size, and usage of local search. The comparison is performed on a suite of six docking problems previously used to evaluate the performance of search algorithms provided with the AutoDock program package. The results from our investigation confirm that the choice of variation operators has an impact on the search-capabilities of EAs. The introduced DockEA using the best settings found obtained the overall best docking solutions compared to the Lamarckian GA (LGA) provided with AutoDock. Furthermore, the DockEA proved to be more robust than the LGA (in terms of reproducing the results in several runs) on the more difficult problems with a high number of flexible torsion angles.

Algorithms↗