The impact of curation errors in the PDBBind Database on machine learning predictions of protein–protein binding affinity

The PDBBind database has been widely utilized for the computational prediction of protein–protein binding affinities. While the accuracy of the PDBBind-curated equilibrium dissociation constants (KD) has been reported for the protein–ligand subset of the PDBBind database, the curation accuracy has not been reported for the protein–protein subset. Here, we present a detailed manual analysis for the subset of PDBBind records with PubMed Central Open Access primary publications and find that ~19% of these records had KD values that were not supported by their primary publications. The impact of these putative curation errors on the machine learning-based prediction of KD from experimental protein–protein 3D structures was evaluated and correcting the curation errors improved the Pearson correlation coefficient between measured and random forest-predicted log10(KD) values by ~8 percentage points. This finding underscores the importance of dataset accuracy for computational modelling and highlights the need for more stringent curation processes when extracting information from the scientific literature.