Noncovalent binding interactions between proteins are the central physicochemical phenomenon underlying biological signaling and functional control on the molecular level. Here, we perform an extensive structural analysis of a large set of bound and unbound ubiquitin conformers and study the level of residual induced fit after conformational selection in the binding process. We show that the region surrounding the binding site in ubiquitin undergoes conformational changes that are significantly more pronounced compared with the whole molecule on average. We demonstrate that these induced-fit structural adjustments are comparable in magnitude to conformational selection. Our final model of ubiquitin binding blends conformational selection with the subsequent induced fit and provides a quantitative measure of their respective contributions.ubiquitin binding ͉ protein recognition ͉ Kolmogorov-Smirnov test T he picture of protein-protein interactions has, over the decades, evolved from the early lock-and-key hypothesis (1) to the generally accepted and widely applied induced-fit model (2, 3). However, several different systems have recently been shown to follow an alternative paradigm whose central element is the idea of conformational selection (4). Within this paradigm, the conformational change in binding is thought to originate primarily from the conformational diversity of the unbound state (5-15). Simply put, the unbound protein explores the energy landscape, spending most of the time in the lowest energy conformations, but also occupying higher-energy ones, some of which are structurally similar to the bound conformations. In the course of binding, because of favorable interactions with the ligand, these conformers get preferentially selected and the population of protein microstates shifts in the direction of bound conformations (4-15). In a way, induced fit and conformational selection are two extremes of possible mechanisms underlying protein interactions (16): in the former, optimal binding is achieved by specific structural change, whereas in the latter it is brought about through selection from the already present unbound ensemble. The two mechanisms have recently been compared from the perspective of kinetics (17) and the energy landscape theory (18).Some of the earliest-described examples of the conformational selection paradigm are the antibody-antigen interactions where an antibody can be found in different unbound conformations, exhibiting different specificity for different antigens (19)(20)(21)(22). Binding then occurs by a simple selection of those antigens whose epitopes are already in a matching conformation for the paratope. In general, growing support for conformational selection in specific protein-protein interactions is based mainly on finding bound-like conformations of proteins in the respective unbound ensembles of structures (12,14,(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30). For example, Gsponer et al. (30) proposed that Ca 2ϩ -bound, ligand-free calmodulin samples the conformational space of ...