Development of a new benchmark for assessing the scoring functions applicable to protein–protein interactions

Scoring functions are important component of protein-protein docking methods. They need to be evaluated on high-quality benchmarks to reveal their strengths and weaknesses. Evaluation results obtained on such benchmarks can provide valuable guidance for developing more advanced scoring functions. Methodology & results: In our comparative assessment of scoring functions for protein-protein interactions benchmark, the performance of a scoring function was characterized by 'docking power' and 'scoring power'. A high-quality dataset of 273 protein-protein complexes was compiled and employed in both tests. Four scoring functions, including FASTCONTACT, ZRANK, dDFIRE and ATTRACT were tested as demonstration. ZRANK and ATTRACT exhibited encouraging performance in the docking power test. However, all four scoring functions failed badly in the scoring power test.Our comparative assessment of scoring functions for protein-protein interaction benchmark is created especially for assessing the scoring functions applicable to protein-protein interactions. It is different from other benchmarks for assessing protein-protein docking methods. Our benchmark is available to the public at www.pdbbind-cn.org/download/CASF-PPI/ .