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Critical Clusters

Andrew Good
Overview / Usage

Overview

The facility to define crucial binding regions within a receptor active site has been added to DOCK 3.5. These interesting receptor regions are described by subsets of the standard receptor site point description and are therefore termed critical clusters. When critical clusters are defined, the user forces DOCK to include at least one member of each cluster within a valid match. Use of critical clusters can thus dramatically decrease the number of possible ligand receptor matches, resulting in increased program speed and forcing DOCK to focus on active site regions of particular interest.

Usage

This feature is enabled through the addition of the keyword critical_clusters to the INDOCK file. Critical centers are defined within the receptor site point (sphgen) file. The 7th field of each center is reserved for critical cluster definitions. Clusters must be defined starting from cluster number 1, with each additional cluster incrementing the number by 1. Each cluster can be comprised of more than one center, but each center may belong to only one cluster (or none at all). The order in which the cluster numbers are used is not vital. A maximum of 10 clusters may be defined. The example below shows a receptor site point file containing 3 critical clusters (highlighted in bold).

DOCK 3.5 receptor_spheres
hydrophobe
acceptor
donor
cluster     1   number of spheres in cluster   13
    1    -1.516    -2.442    -5.002    1.00  100 1  3
    3    -3.432    -2.547    -3.589    1.00  100 1  3 
    6     0.283    -0.246    -1.971    1.00  100 0  3
   16     1.462     2.426    -9.798    1.00  100 3  1
   17     2.506     1.668   -10.364    1.00  100 0  1
   18     3.294     0.965    -9.504    1.00  100 2  1 
   20     1.928     1.764    -7.628    1.00  100 0  1
   21     1.182     2.556    -8.408    1.00  100 0  1
   22     0.726     3.234   -10.769    1.00  100 3  2
   23     1.229     3.476   -11.857    1.00  100 3  2
   26    -1.843     5.405   -10.298    1.00  100 0  2
   27    -2.038     5.083    -8.996    1.00  100 0  2
   28    -2.374     6.568   -10.497    1.00  100 0  2

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Curator: Daniel Gschwend, gschwend@cgl.ucsf.edu (rev. 1 September 1995)