Flexible docking of a ligand peptide to a receptor protein by multicanonical molecular dynamics simulation

A new method for flexible docking by multicanonical molecular dynamics simulation is presented. The method was applied to the binding of a short proline-rich peptide to a Src homology 3 (SH3) domain. The peptide and the side-chains at the ligand binding cleft of SH3 were completely flexible and the large number of possible conformations and dispositions of the peptide were sampled. The reweighted canonical ensemble at 300 K resulted in only a few predominant binding modes, one of which was similar to the complex crystal structure. The inverted peptide orientation was also observed in the other binding modes. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.