New measures for estimating surface complementarity and packing at protein-protein interfaces.

A number of methods exist that use different approaches to assess geometric properties like the surface complementarity and atom packing at the protein-protein interface. We have developed two new and conceptually different measures using the Delaunay tessellation and interface slice selection to compute the surface complementarity and atom packing at the protein-protein interface in a straightforward manner. Our measures show a strong correlation among themselves and with other existing measures, and can be calculated in a highly time-efficient manner. The measures are discriminative for evaluating biological, as well as non-biological protein-protein contacts, especially from large protein complexes and large-scale structural studies (http://pallab.serc.iisc.ernet.in/nip_nsc). Copyright 2010 Federation of European Biochemical Societies. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.