Dockground Tool for Development and Benchmarking of Protein Docking Procedures

Databases of protein-protein complexes are essential for the development of protein modeling/docking techniques. Such databases provide a knowledge base for docking algorithms, intermolecular potentials, search procedures, scoring functions, and refinement protocols. Development of docking techniques requires systematic validation of the modeling protocols on carefully curated benchmark sets of complexes. We present a description and a guide to the DOCKGROUND resource ( http://dockground.compbio.ku.edu ) for structural modeling of protein interactions. The resource integrates various datasets of protein complexes and other data for the development and testing of protein docking techniques. The sets include bound complexes, experimentally determined unbound, simulated unbound, model-model complexes, and docking decoys. The datasets are available to the user community through a Web interface.