Improving the artificial bee colony algorithm with a proprietary estimation of distribution mechanism for protein-ligand docking

The protein-ligand docking problem plays an essential role in structure-based drug design. The challenge for a protein-ligand docking method is how to execute an efficient conformational search to explore a well-designed scoring function. In this study, we improved the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm and proposed an approach called ABC-EDM to solve the protein-ligand docking problem. ABC-EDM employs the scoring function of the classical AutoDock Vina to evaluate a solution during docking simulation. ABC-EDM adopts the search framework of the canonical ABC algorithm to execute conformational search. By further investigating the characteristics of the protein-ligand docking problem, a proprietary search mechanism inspired by estimation of distribution algorithm, i.e., estimation of distribution mechanism (EDM), is designed to enhance the performance of ABC-EDM. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed ABC-EDM, we compare it with three variants of the ABC algorithm, three evolutionary computation algorithms, and AutoDock Vina. The experimental results show that ABC-EDM can effectively solve the protein-ligand docking problem, and it can achieve a success rate 5% higher than AutoDock Vina on the GOLD dataset. This study reveals that taking advantage of problem-specific information about the protein-ligand docking problem to enhance a docking method contributes to solving this problem.