What does the DLID score mean in ICMPocketFinder?

[Andrew Orry]

Q.

I have run ICMPocketFinder and have found a number of pockets and the results are displayed graphically and in a table. One of the columns in the table is DLID - what does this mean?

A.

Factors that can influence ligand binding to a pocket include the pocket volume and area, buriedness, hydrophobicity, and how compact the pocket is. All these properties are calculated using ICMPocketFinder and tabulated. Scientists at Merck used MolSoft's ICMPocketFinder algorithm to define a way for quantifying "drugability" of a protein target. The metric they used is called Drug-Like-Density (DLID) and the score is reported in the table and a value >0.5 is considered druggable.

You can read a paper about DLID here: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ci100312t

[Andrew Orry]

The documentation on ICMPocketFinder is here: http://www.molsoft.com/gui/3d-predict.html#3d-predict-tools-identify-ligand-binding-pocket