TL;DR
The proposed MPFDock is a tightly coupled equivariant flow matching method for molecular docking guided by multimodal physical constraints in Cartesian space that consistently outperforms existing methods in terms of docking accuracy and physical realism on the evaluated benchmarks.
GeoNet is a physicochemical-principle-guided framework for modeling dual-range atomic interactions that achieves the smallest model size and the shortest training time, demonstrating both superior predictive performance and computational efficiency.
An enhanced local optimization strategy based on curved line search (CLS) is introduced and integrated into AutoDock Vina, resulting in Vina_CLS, demonstrating that improved local optimization can substantially enhance docking performance.
PandaDock’s empirical scoring function ranks 8th of 25 methods evaluated, ahead of every AutoDock Vina and Vinardo configuration tested, while the GNN scores below Vina, consistent with the within-target ceiling identified on SAIR.
Biomolecular binder design for peptides and antibodies requires generating diverse candidates that satisfy stringent three-dimensional geometric constraints while enabling affinity-oriented exploration under strong structural priors. In current generative models, the effective search space for structurally feasible binders is severely constrained, as the complexity of biochemical interactions is not explicitly encoded into a semantically grounded representation of viable molecular manifolds. To address this challenge, we propose Pretrained Representation Induced Molecular gEneration (PRIME), a unified generative framework for three-dimensional binder design across peptides and antibodies. PRIME grounds stochastic generation on frozen large-scale pretrained structural representations, inheriting robust physical priors to ensure structural feasibility without training a manifold from scratch. However, defining a feasible space alone is insufficient for effective exploration. Under commonly used isotropic perturbations, chain topology is ignored, allowing local noise to propagate into global structural distortions. To enable controlled exploration within the feasible space, we introduce Semantics-Preserving Exploratory Sampling (SPES), which integrates Graph Laplacian Spectral Noise to respect chain connectivity and Conditional Freedom Modulation to dynamically balance exploration with fidelity. By aligning stochastic exploration with structural semantics, PRIME enables diversity-enhanced generation without sacrificing geometric validity under the reported structural metrics, improving the empirical exploration--fidelity trade-off. PRIME achieves state-of-the-art performance on unified peptide and antibody benchmarks, effectively reconciling geometric validity with functional optimization under computational proxy metrics. The source code is available at https://github.com/simplaj/PRIME.
Accurate identification of near-native ligand binding poses is a central challenge in structure-based drug design. From a physical point of view, the successful construction of a protein-ligand complex structure is dependent on whether protein and ligand can form enough atomically pairwise interactions that result in a global energy minimum. In this work, we report a machine learning scoring strategy for protein-ligand screening which explicitly considers the Native Contact Ratio (NCR), a topology inspired metric that quantifies the preservation of protein-ligand interfacial contacts as well as interaction energy. This physics-awared supervision strategy provides a simple but efficient gradient field that faithfully reflects the complicated protein energy landscape than conventional 3D coordinate-based objectives. Building on this principle, we present DeepNCR, an energy-informed Transformer framework that encodes approximate Coulombic and dispersive interaction potentials across the protein-ligand binding interface. Furthermore, we introduce a feature pruning step that compresses the interaction tensor from 1470 to 868 dimensions, further improving signal-to-noise ratio and directing model attention toward the interaction motifs critical for binding specificity. The model optimizes topological objectives and at inference drives pose refinement through a differentiable hybrid gradient field integrating predicted NCR and AutoDock Vina energetics. Extensive evaluation on the CASF-2016 benchmark and the 3D-DISCO cross-docking data set demonstrates consistently high performance: a Top-1 docking success rate of 94.7%, a 1% Enrichment Factor of 21.21 in virtual screening, and a Top-1 cross-docking success rate of 34.8%. Mechanistic analysis reveals that NCR-guided optimization enables decoy escaping from local energy minima and drives the recovery of disrupted native interactions, confirming that NCR captures the physical determinants of binding rather than mere geometric proximity.
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