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  <front>
    <journal-meta>
      <journal-id journal-id-type="iso-abbrev">Pharmacophore</journal-id>
      <journal-id journal-id-type="publisher-id">pharmacophorejournal.com</journal-id>
      <journal-id journal-id-type="publisher-id">Pharmacophore</journal-id>
      <journal-title-group>
        <journal-title>Pharmacophore</journal-title>
      </journal-title-group>
      <issn pub-type="epub">2229-5402</issn>
    </journal-meta>
    <article-meta>
      <article-id pub-id-type="publisher-id">pharmacophorejournal.com-6883</article-id>
      <article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.51847/jGMqmzd7Dk</article-id>
      <article-categories>
        <subj-group subj-group-type="heading">
          <subject>Original research</subject>
        </subj-group>
      </article-categories>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Physics-Informed Graph Neural Networks for Binding Free-Energy Prediction from Docking and Dynamics Data</article-title>
      </title-group>
                    <contrib-group>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Rahman</surname>
                <given-names>Siti</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff1" ref-type="aff">1</xref>
                                                            <xref rid="cor1" ref-type="corresp" />
                          </contrib>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Zaki</surname>
                <given-names>Ahmad</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff1" ref-type="aff">1</xref>
                                        </contrib>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Huda</surname>
                <given-names>Nurul</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff2" ref-type="aff">2</xref>
                                        </contrib>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Faisal</surname>
                <given-names>Amir</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff1" ref-type="aff">1</xref>
                                        </contrib>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Wei</surname>
                <given-names>Lim</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff2" ref-type="aff">2</xref>
                                        </contrib>
                  </contrib-group>
                  <aff id="aff1">
            <label>1</label>Department of Pharmaceutical AI Engineering, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
          </aff>
                  <aff id="aff2">
            <label>2</label>Department of Computational Drug Analytics, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru, Malaysia.
          </aff>
                          <author-notes>
            <corresp id="cor1">
              <bold>Address for correspondence:</bold> Prof. Wael Abu Dayyih, Department of
              Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy, Mutah University, Al-Karak 61710, Jordan.
                              E-mail: <email xlink:href="siti.rahman@outlook.com">siti.rahman@outlook.com</email>
                          </corresp>
          </author-notes>
                    <pub-date pub-type="epub">
        <day>28</day>
        <month>02</month>
        <year>2026</year>
      </pub-date>
      <volume>17</volume>
      <issue>1</issue>
      <fpage>101</fpage>
      <lpage>110</lpage>
      <permissions>
        <copyright-statement>
          Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Pharmacophore
        </copyright-statement>
        <copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
        <license>
          <ali:license_ref xmlns:ali="http://www.niso.org/schemas/ali/1.0/"
            specific-use="textmining" content-type="ccbyncsalicense">
            https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/</ali:license_ref>
          <license-p>This is an open access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of
            the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows
            others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate
            credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.</license-p>
        </license>
      </permissions>
      <abstract>
        <title>A<sc>BSTRACT</sc></title>
        <p>Reliable prediction of protein–ligand binding free energy is central to hit-to-lead optimization because affinity guides prioritization, analogue design, and resource allocation. Classical docking is fast and scalable, but its simplified scoring functions often struggle across chemically diverse ligand series. Purely data-driven models can learn dataset-specific chemical patterns that may not reflect realistic molecular recognition. Conversely, purely physics-based approaches can miss high-dimensional statistical regularities present in curated structural and affinity datasets. This article proposes a physics-informed graph neural network for predicting absolute binding free energy from protein–ligand complex structures. The model integrates docking scores, molecular-dynamics-derived interaction descriptors, and force-field-inspired energy terms within a unified graph representation. The proposed architecture uses three-dimensional, SE(3)-aware message passing over protein–ligand complex graphs. Atom and residue features are augmented with docking-derived pose information, molecular dynamics descriptors, and pre-computed electrostatic and van der Waals interaction terms.
Conceptually, such a model would be expected to provide more physically consistent affinity estimates than purely empirical scoring functions. It could also support interpretable atom-level and residue-level interaction analysis for medicinal chemistry decision-making. Physics-informed graph learning offers a principled bridge between rigorous molecular thermodynamics and flexible deep representation learning. This framework provides a scalable model-oriented route toward more reliable in silico affinity optimization.
 </p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
                <kwd>Physics-informed learning</kwd>
                <kwd>Graph neural networks</kwd>
                <kwd>Binding free energy</kwd>
                <kwd>Molecular docking</kwd>
                <kwd>Molecular dynamics</kwd>
                <kwd>Protein–ligand complexes</kwd>
              </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
</article>