Revisiting Automated G-Protein Coupled Receptor Modeling: The Benefit of Additional Template Structures for a Neurokinin-1 Receptor Model

The feasibility of automated procedures for the modeling of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCR) is investigated on the example of the human neurokinin-1 (NK1) receptor. We use a combined method of homology modeling and molecular docking and analyze the information content of the resulting docking complexes regarding the binding mode for further refinements. Moreover, we explore the impact of different template structures, the bovine rhodopsin structure, the human β₂ adrenergic receptor, and in particular a combination of both templates to include backbone flexibility in the target conformational space. Our results for NK1 modeling demonstrate that model selection from a set of decoys can in general not solely rely on docking experiments but still requires additional mutagenesis data. However, an enrichment factor of 2.6 in a nearly fully automated approach indicates that reasonable models can be created automatically if both available templates are used for model construction. Thus, the recently resolved GPCR structures open new ways to improve the model building fundamentally.