Accounting for pairwise distance restraints in FFT-based protein-protein docking

ClusPro is a heavily used protein-protein docking server based on the fast Fourier transform (FFT) correlation approach. While FFT enables global docking, accounting for pairwise distance restraints using penalty terms in the scoring function is computationally expensive. We use a different approach and directly select low energy solutions that also satisfy the given restraints. As expected, accounting for restraints generally improves the rank of near native predictions, while retaining or even improving the numerical efficiency of FFT based docking.