In computational structure-based drug design, the scoring functions are the
cornerstones to the success of design/discovery. Many approaches have been
explored to improve their reliability and accuracy, leading to three famil
ies of scoring functions: force-field-based, knowledge-based, and empirical
. The last family is the most widely used in association with docking algor
ithms because of its speed, even though such empirical scoring functions pr
oduce far too many false positives to be fully reliable. In this work, we d
escribe a World Wide Web accessible database that gathers the structural in
formation from known complexes of the PDB with experimental binding data. T
his database, the Ligand-Protein DataBase (LPDB), is designed to allow the
selection of complexes based on various properties of receptors and ligands
for the design and parametrization of new scoring functions or to assess a
nd improve existing ones. Moreover, for each complex, a continuum of ligand
positions ranging from the crystallographic position to points on the surf
ace of the protein receptor allows an assessment of the energetic behavior
of particular scoring functions.