Assessment of Pharmaceutical Protein-Ligand Pose and Affinity Predictions in CASP16.

ABSTRACT: The protein-ligand component of the 16th Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP16) challenged participants to predict both binding poses and affinities of small molecules to protein targets, with a focus on drug-like compounds from pharmaceutical discovery projects. Thirty research groups submitted predictions for 229 protein-ligand pose targets and 140 affinity targets across five protein systems. Among the submitted predictions, template-based pose-prediction methods did particularly well, with the best groups achieving mean LDDT-PLI values of 0.69 (scale of 0-1 with 1 best). For comparison, we also ran a set of automated baseline pose-prediction methods, including ones using deep neural networks. Of these, AlphaFold 3 did particularly well, with a mean LDDT-PLI of 0.8, thus o

SUBMITTER: Gilson MK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12750038 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature