2.5. Molecular docking simulations
FRED 2.1 (McGann et al., 2003) was used in this study to
dock the OMEGA pre-generated multi-conformer library
mentioned above. FRED 2.1 strategy is to exhaustively dock/
score all possible positions of each ligand in the binding site.
The exhaustive search is based on rigid rotations and
translations of each conformer within the binding site defined
by a box. FRED filtered the poses ensemble by rejecting the
ones that clash with the protein (LOX) or that does not have
enough contacts with the protein. The final poses can then be
scored or re-scored using one or more scoring functions. In
this study, the smooth shape-based Gaussian scoring function
(shapegauss) was selected to evaluate the shape complementarily
between each ligand and the binding pocket.
Default FRED protocol was used except for the size of the
box defining the binding sites. In an attempt to optimize the
docking–scoring performance we performed exhaustive
docking with shapegauss applying the “Optimization” mode.
The “Optimization” mode involves a systematic solid body
optimization of the top ranked poses from the exhaustive
docking. 3 different boxes were explored for LOX (PDB ID:
1JNQ). Three different simulations were carried out with an
added value of 8 Å around the reference ligand.