ATRIPPI: An Atom-residue Preference Scoring Function for Protein-protein Interactions

We present an ATRIPPI model for analyzing protein-protein interactions. This model is a 167-atom-type and residue-specific interaction preferences with distance bins derived from 641 co-crystallized protein-protein interfaces. The ATRIPPI model is able to yield physical meanings of hydrogen bonding, disulfide bonding, electrostatic interactions, van der Waals and aromatic-aromatic interactions. We applied this model to identify the native states and near-native complex structures on 17 bound and 17 unbound complexes from thousands of decoy structures. On average, 77.5% structures (155 structures) of top rank 200 structures are closed to the native structure. These results suggest that the ATRIPPI model is able to keep the advantages of both atom-atom and residue-residue interactions and is a potential knowledge-based scoring function for protein-protein docking methods. We believe that our model is robust and provides biological meanings to support protein-protein interactions.