Assessing the potential of deep learning for protein–ligand docking

The effects of ligand binding on protein structures and their in vivo functions carry numerous implications for modern biomedical research and biotechnology development efforts such as drug discovery. Although several deep learning (DL) methods and benchmarks designed for protein-ligand docking have recently been introduced, so far no previous works have systematically studied the behaviour of the latest docking and structure prediction methods within the broadly applicable context of: (1) using predicted (apo) protein structures for docking (for example, for applicability to new proteins); (2) binding multiple (cofactor) ligands concurrently to a given target protein (for example, for enzyme design); and (3) having no previous knowledge of binding pockets (for example, for generalization to unknown pockets). To enable a deeper understanding of the real-world utility of docking methods, we introduce PoseBench, a comprehensive benchmark for broadly applicable protein-ligand docking. PoseBench enables researchers to rigorously and systematically evaluate DL methods for apo-to-holo protein-ligand docking and protein-ligand structure prediction using both primary ligand and multiligand benchmark datasets, the latter of which we introduce to the DL community. Empirically, using PoseBench, we find that: (1) DL cofolding methods generally outperform comparable conventional and DL docking baseline algorithms, but popular methods such as AlphaFold 3 are still challenged by prediction targets with new protein-ligand binding poses; (2) certain DL cofolding methods are highly sensitive to their input multiple sequence alignments, whereas others are not; and (3) DL methods struggle to strike a balance between structural accuracy and chemical specificity when predicting new or multiligand protein targets.