Atomic-level evolutionary information improves protein–protein interface scoring

The crucial role of protein interactions and the difficulty in characterizing them experimentally strongly motivates the development of computational approaches for structural prediction. Even when protein-protein docking samples correct models, current scoring functions struggle to discriminate them from incorrect decoys. The previous incorporation of conservation and coevolution information has shown promise for improving protein-protein scoring. Here, we present a novel strategy to integrate atomic-level evolutionary information into different types of scoring functions to improve their docking discrimination.