| Protein-peptide interactions have attracted the attention of many drug discovery scientists due to their possible
druggability features on most key biological activities such as regulating disease-related signaling pathways and
enhancing the immune system’s responses. Different studies have utilized some protein-peptide-specific docking
algorithms/methods to predict protein-peptide interactions. However, the existing algorithms/methods suffer
from two serious limitations which make them unsuitable for protein-peptide docking problems. First, it seems
that the prevalent approaches require to be modified and remodeled for weighting the unbounded forces between a protein and a peptide. Second, they do not employ state-of-the-art search algorithms for detecting the 3D
pose of a peptide relative to a protein. To address these restrictions, the present study aims to introduce a novel
multi-objective algorithm, which first generates some potential 3D poses of a peptide, and then, improves them
through its operators. The candidate solutions are further evaluated using Multi-Objective Pareto Front (MOPF)
optimization concepts. To this end, van der Waals, electrostatic, solvation, and hydrogen bond energies between
the atoms of a protein and designated peptide are computed. To evaluate the algorithm, it is first applied to the
LEADS-PEP dataset containing 53 protein-peptide complexes with up to 53 rotatable branches/bonds and then
compared with three popular/efficient algorithms. The obtained results indicate that the MOPF-based approaches which reduce the backbone RMSD between the original and predicted states, achieve significantly
better results in terms of the success rate in predicting the near-native conditions. Besides, a comparison between
the different types of search algorithms reveals that efficient ones like the multi-objective Trader/differential
evolution algorithm can predict protein-peptide interactions better than the popular algorithms such as the
multi-objective genetic/particle swarm optimization algorithms. |