Rapid Shape-Based Ligand Alignment and Virtual Screening Method Based on Atom/Feature-Pair Similarities and Volume Overlap Scoring

Shape-based methods for aligning and scoring ligands have proven to be valuable in the field of computer-aided drug design. Here, we describe a new shape-based flexible ligand superposition and virtual screening method, Phase Shape, which is shown to rapidly produce accurate 3D ligand alignments and efficiently enrich actives in virtual screening. We describe the methodology, which is based on the principle of atom distribution triplets to rapidly define trial alignments, followed by refinement of top alignments to maximize the volume overlap. The method can be run in a shape-only mode or it can include atom types or pharmacophore feature encoding, the latter consistently producing the best results for database screening. We apply Phase Shape to flexibly align molecules that bind to the same target and show that the method consistently produces correct alignments when compared with crystal structures. We then illustrate the effectiveness of the method for identifying active compounds in virtual screening of eleven diverse targets. Multiple parameters are explored, including atom typing, query structure conformation, and the database conformer generation protocol. We show that Phase Shape performs well in database screening calculations when compared with other shape-based methods using a common set of actives and decoys from the literature.