Figure 1

Flowchart of the docking-based stepwise oligomerization approach. The quaternary structure prediction approach consists in a number of dense docking samplings, starting from the docking of two identical copies of a given monomer. Each docking run is followed by membrane topology filtering and cluster analysis. Thus, prediction of the native oligomer is accomplished by a number of progressive growing steps, each made of one docking run, filtering and cluster analysis. For each stepwise quaternary structure prediction, the docking runs that succeeded the first one were carried out by using the original monomer as a probe and the intermediate oligomer as a target.