Exploring the interplay between experimental methods and the performance of predictors of binding affinity change upon mutations in protein complexes

Reliable prediction of binding affinity changes (ΔΔG) upon mutations in protein complexes relies not only on the performance of computational methods but also on the availability and quality of experimental data. Binding affinity changes can be measured by various experimental methods with different accuracies and limitations. To understand the impact of these on the prediction of binding affinity change, we present the Database of binding Affinity Change Upon Mutation (DACUM), a database of 1872 binding affinity changes upon single-point mutations, a subset of the SKEMPI database (Moal,I.H. and Fernández-Recio,J. Bioinformatics, 2012;28:2600-2607) extended with information on the experimental methods used for ΔΔG measurements. The ΔΔG data were classified into different data sets based on the experimental method used and the position of the mutation (interface and non-interface). We tested the prediction performance of the original HADDOCK score, a newly trained version of it and mutation Cutoff Scanning Matrix (Pires,D.E.V., Ascher,D.B. and Blundell,T.L. Bioinformatics 2014;30:335-342), one of the best reported ΔΔG predictors so far, on these various data sets. Our results demonstrate a strong impact of the experimental methods on the performance of binding affinity change predictors for protein complexes. This underscores the importance of properly considering and carefully choosing experimental methods in the development of novel binding affinity change predictors. The DACUM database is available online at https://github.com/haddocking/DACUM.