A systematic study of low-resolution recognition in protein--protein complexes.

A comprehensive nonredundant database of 475 cocrystallized protein-protein complexes was used to study low-resolution recognition, which was reported in earlier docking experiments with a small number of proteins. The docking program GRAMM was used to delete the atom-size structural details and systematically dock the resulting molecular images. The results reveal the existence of the low-resolution recognition in 52% of all complexes in the database and in 76% of the 113 complexes with an interface area >4,000 A(2). Limitations of the docking and analysis tools used in this study suggest that the actual number of complexes with the low-resolution recognition is higher. However, the results already prove the existence of the low-resolution recognition on a broad scale.