An Improved Protein Surface Extraction Method Using Rotating Cylinder Probe

For extraction of information on binding sites of a protein, the commonly known geometry-based methods utilize the corresponding PDB file to extract its surface as a first step. Finally, the surface is used to find the binding site atoms. As shown in this paper work, since none of the mostly used surface extraction methods can retrieve a sizeable percentage of the binding site atoms, the scope of development of a better method remains. In this direction, this paper presents a new benchmarking criteria based on utilization of binding site information to compare performance of these surface extraction methods. Also, a new surface extraction method is introduced based on the use of a rotating cylinder probe adapting from the work of Weisel et al. (Chem Cent J 1:7–23, 2007. doi:10.1186/1752-153X-1-7). The result of the new method shows a significant improvement of performance in comparison to the existing methods.