Power transformations improve interpolation of grids for molecular mechanics interaction energies.

A common strategy for speeding up molecular docking calculations is to precompute nonbonded interaction energies between a receptor molecule and a set of three-dimensional grids. The grids are then interpolated to compute energies for ligand atoms in many different binding poses. Here, I evaluate a smoothing strategy of taking a power transformation of grid point energies and inverse transformation of the result from trilinear interpolation. For molecular docking poses from 85 protein-ligand complexes, this smoothing procedure leads to significant accuracy improvements, including an approximately twofold reduction in the root mean square error at a grid spacing of 0.4 Å and retaining the ability to rank docking poses even at a grid spacing of 0.7 Å.