Protein–peptide docking: opportunities and challenges

Peptides have recently attracted much attention as promising drug candidates. Rational design of peptide-derived therapeutics usually requires structural characterization of the underlying protein–peptide interaction. Given that experimental characterization can be difficult, reliable computational tools are needed. In recent years, a variety of approaches have been developed for ‘protein–peptide docking’ that is, predicting the structure of the protein–peptide complex, starting from the protein structure and the peptide sequence, including variable degrees of information about the peptide binding site and/or conformation. In this review, we provide an overview of protein–peptide docking methods and outline their capabilities, limitations, and applications in structure-based drug design. Key challenges are also briefly discussed, such as modeling of large-scale conformational changes upon binding, scoring of predicted models, and optimal inclusion of varied types of experimental data and theoretical predictions into an integrative modeling process.