scholarly journals Layer-wise relevance propagation of InteractionNet explains protein–ligand interactions at the atom level

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyeoncheol Cho ◽  
Eok Kyun Lee ◽  
Insung S. Choi

AbstractDevelopment of deep-learning models for intermolecular noncovalent (NC) interactions between proteins and ligands has great potential in the chemical and pharmaceutical tasks, including structure–activity relationship and drug design. It still remains an open question how to convert the three-dimensional, structural information of a protein–ligand complex into a graph representation in the graph neural networks (GNNs). It is also difficult to know whether a trained GNN model learns the NC interactions properly. Herein, we propose a GNN architecture that learns two distinct graphs—one for the intramolecular covalent bonds in a protein and a ligand, and the other for the intermolecular NC interactions between the protein and the ligand—separately by the corresponding covalent and NC convolutional layers. The graph separation has some advantages, such as independent evaluation on the contribution of each convolutional step to the prediction of dissociation constants, and facile analysis of graph-building strategies for the NC interactions. In addition to its prediction performance that is comparable to that of a state-of-the art model, the analysis with an explainability strategy of layer-wise relevance propagation shows that our model successfully predicts the important characteristics of the NC interactions, especially in the aspect of hydrogen bonding, in the chemical interpretation of protein–ligand binding.

2003 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 1006-1009 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Clarkson ◽  
I.D. Campbell

Solution-state NMR has become an accepted method for studying the structure of small proteins in solution. This has resulted in over 3000 NMR-based co-ordinate sets being deposited in the Protein Databank. It is becoming increasingly apparent, however, that NMR is also a very powerful tool for accessing interactions between macromolecules and various ligands. These interactions can be assessed at a wide variety of levels, e.g. qualitative screening of libraries of pharmaceuticals and ‘chemical shift mapping’. Dissociation constants can sometimes be obtained in such cases. Another example would be the complete three-dimensional structure determination of a protein–ligand complex. Here we briefly describe a few of the principles involved and illustrate the method with recent examples.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-247
Author(s):  
Krishna A. Gajjar ◽  
Anuradha K. Gajjar

Background: Pharmacophore mapping and molecular docking can be synergistically integrated to improve the drug design and discovery process. A rational strategy, combiphore approach, derived from the combined study of Structure and Ligand based pharmacophore has been described to identify novel GPR40 modulators. Methods: DISCOtech module from Discovery studio was used for the generation of the Structure and Ligand based pharmacophore models which gave hydrophobic aromatic, ring aromatic and negative ionizable as essential pharmacophoric features. The generated models were validated by screening active and inactive datasets, GH scoring and ROC curve analysis. The best model was exposed as a 3D query to screen the hits from databases like GLASS (GPCR-Ligand Association), GPCR SARfari and Mini-Maybridge. Various filters were applied to retrieve the hit molecules having good drug-like properties. A known protein structure of hGPR40 (pdb: 4PHU) having TAK-875 as ligand complex was used to perform the molecular docking studies; using SYBYL-X 1.2 software. Results and Conclusion: Clustering both the models gave RMSD of 0.89. Therefore, the present approach explored the maximum features by combining both ligand and structure based pharmacophore models. A common structural motif as identified in combiphore for GPR40 modulation consists of the para-substituted phenyl propionic acid scaffold. Therefore, the combiphore approach, whereby maximum structural information (from both ligand and biological protein) is explored, gives maximum insights into the plausible protein-ligand interactions and provides potential lead candidates as exemplified in this study.


Author(s):  
G.C. K. Roberts ◽  
L.-Y. Lian

The biological functions of proteins all depend on their highly specific interactions with other molecules, and the understanding of the molecular basis of the specificity of these interactions is an important part of the effort to understand protein structure-function relationships. NMR spectroscopy can provide information on many different aspects of protein-ligand interactions, ranging from the determination of the complete structure of a protein-ligand complex to focussing on selected features of the interactions between the ligand and protein by using “reporter groups” on the ligand or the protein. It has two particular advantages: the ability to study the complex in solution, and the ability to provide not only structural, but also dynamic, kinetic and thermodynamic information on ligand binding. Early analyses of ligand binding (Jardetzky and Roberts, 1981) focused on measurements of relaxation times, chemical shifts and coupling constants, which gave relatively limited, although valuable, structural information. More recently, it has become possible to obtain much more detailed information, due to the extensive use of nuclear Overhauser effect measurements and isotope-labeled proteins and ligands; a number of reviews of this area are available (Feeney and Birdsall, 1993; Lian et al, 1994; Wand and Short, 1994; Petros and Fesik, 1994; Wemmer and Williams, 1994). In this article, we describe some recent work from our laboratory which illustrates the use of NMR spectroscopy to obtain structural and mechanistic information on relatively large enzyme-substrate and proteinprotein complexes. A number of species of pathogenic bacteria, notably Streptococci and Staphylococci, have proteins on their surface that bind immurioglobulins (reviewed in Boyle (1990)). Protein A from S. aureus and protein G from species of Streptococci are widely used as imrnunological tools and are the most extensively studied of these antibody-binding proteins. A detailed understanding of the binding mechanisms of these proteins is important, not only for providing us with the structural basis for their functions, but also as a contribution toward understanding the general rules of protein-protein interactions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (D1) ◽  
pp. D1122-D1129
Author(s):  
Hongyan Du ◽  
Junbo Gao ◽  
Gaoqi Weng ◽  
Junjie Ding ◽  
Xin Chai ◽  
...  

Abstract Inhibitors that form covalent bonds with their targets have traditionally been considered highly adventurous due to their potential off-target effects and toxicity concerns. However, with the clinical validation and approval of many covalent inhibitors during the past decade, design and discovery of novel covalent inhibitors have attracted increasing attention. A large amount of scattered experimental data for covalent inhibitors have been reported, but a resource by integrating the experimental information for covalent inhibitor discovery is still lacking. In this study, we presented Covalent Inhibitor Database (CovalentInDB), the largest online database that provides the structural information and experimental data for covalent inhibitors. CovalentInDB contains 4511 covalent inhibitors (including 68 approved drugs) with 57 different reactive warheads for 280 protein targets. The crystal structures of some of the proteins bound with a covalent inhibitor are provided to visualize the protein–ligand interactions around the binding site. Each covalent inhibitor is annotated with the structure, warhead, experimental bioactivity, physicochemical properties, etc. Moreover, CovalentInDB provides the covalent reaction mechanism and the corresponding experimental verification methods for each inhibitor towards its target. High-quality datasets are downloadable for users to evaluate and develop computational methods for covalent drug design. CovalentInDB is freely accessible at http://cadd.zju.edu.cn/cidb/.


2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (08) ◽  
pp. 2130002
Author(s):  
Connor J. Morris ◽  
Dennis Della Corte

Molecular docking and molecular dynamics (MD) are powerful tools used to investigate protein-ligand interactions. Molecular docking programs predict the binding pose and affinity of a protein-ligand complex, while MD can be used to incorporate flexibility into docking calculations and gain further information on the kinetics and stability of the protein-ligand bond. This review covers state-of-the-art methods of using molecular docking and MD to explore protein-ligand interactions, with emphasis on application to drug discovery. We also call for further research on combining common molecular docking and MD methods.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 1014-1021 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.-L. Noresson ◽  
O. Aurelius ◽  
C. T. Öberg ◽  
O. Engström ◽  
A. P. Sundin ◽  
...  

3-Benzamido-2-O-sulfo-galactosides can be designed to control protein conformation into forming entropically favourable galectin-3-arginine salt bridges with ligand sulfates.


2007 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen F. Martin

It is generally assumed that preorganizing a flexible ligand in the three-dimensional shape it adopts when bound to a macromolecular receptor will provide a derivative having an increased binding affinity, primarily because the rigidified molecule is expected to benefit from a lesser entropic penalty during complexation. We now provide the first experimental evidence that demonstrates this common belief is not universally true. Indeed, we find that ligand preorganization may be accompanied by an unfavorable entropy of binding, even when the constrained ligand exhibits a higher binding affinity than its flexible control. Thus, the effects that ligand preorganization have upon energetics and structure in protein-ligand interactions must be reevaluated.


2017 ◽  
Vol 73 (6) ◽  
pp. 522-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward P. Morris ◽  
Paula C. A. da Fonseca

With the recent advances in biological structural electron microscopy (EM), protein structures can now be obtained by cryo-EM and single-particle analysis at resolutions that used to be achievable only by crystallographic or NMR methods. We have explored their application to study protein–ligand interactions using the human 20S proteasome, a well established target for cancer therapy that is also being investigated as a target for an increasing range of other medical conditions. The map of a ligand-bound human 20S proteasome served as a proof of principle that cryo-EM is emerging as a realistic approach for more general structural studies of protein–ligand interactions, with the potential benefits of extending such studies to complexes that are unfavourable to other methods and allowing structure determination under conditions that are closer to physiological, preserving ligand specificity towards closely related binding sites. Subsequently, the cryo-EM structure of thePlasmodium falciparum20S proteasome, with a new prototype specific inhibitor bound, revealed the molecular basis for the ligand specificity towards the parasite complex, which provides a framework to guide the development of highly needed new-generation antimalarials. Here, the cryo-EM analysis of the ligand-bound human andP. falciparum20S proteasomes is reviewed, and a complete description of the methods used for structure determination is provided, including the strategy to overcome the bias orientation of the human 20S proteasome on electron-microscope grids and details of theicr3dsoftware used for three-dimensional reconstruction.


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