Structure Prediction and Active Site Analysis of New H1N1 Neuraminidase:Target for Antiviral Drug Design

Since December 2019, the world has been facing the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic that has infected more than 149 million and killed 3.1 million people by 27 April 2021, according to WHO statistics. Safety measures and precautions taken by many countries seem insufficient, especially with no specific approved drugs against the virus. This has created an urgent need to fast track the development of new medication against the virus in order to alleviate the problem and meet public expectations. The SARS-CoV-2 3CL main protease (Mpro) is one of the most attractive targets in the virus life cycle, which is responsible for the processing of the viral polyprotein and is a key for the ribosomal translation of the SARS-CoV-2 genome. In this work, we targeted this enzyme through a structure-based drug design (SBDD) protocol, which aimed at the design of a new potential inhibitor for Mpro. The protocol involves three major steps: fragment-based drug design (FBDD), covalent docking and molecular dynamics (MD) simulation with the calculation of the designed molecule binding free energy at a high level of theory. The FBDD step identified five molecular fragments, which were linked via a suitable carbon linker, to construct our designed compound RMH148. The mode of binding and initial interactions between RMH148 and the enzyme active site was established in the second step of our protocol via covalent docking. The final step involved the use of MD simulations to test for the stability of the docked RMH148 into the Mpro active site and included precise calculations for potential interactions with active site residues and binding free energies. The results introduced RMH148 as a potential inhibitor for the SARS-CoV-2 Mpro enzyme, which was able to achieve various interactions with the enzyme and forms a highly stable complex at the active site even better than the co-crystalized reference.

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Rethinking protein drug design with highly accurate structure prediction of anti-CRISPR proteins

10.1101/2021.11.28.470242 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Ho-min Park ◽

Yunseol Park ◽

Joris Vankerschaver ◽

Arnout Van Messem ◽

Wesley De Neve ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Protein Structure ◽

Drug Design ◽

Structure Prediction ◽

Modern Medicine ◽

Protein Therapeutics ◽

Protein Drug ◽

Host Proteins ◽

Small Proteins ◽

Small Molecule Therapeutics ◽

Host Parasite

Protein therapeutics play an important role in controlling the functions and activities of disease-causing proteins in modern medicine. Despite protein therapeutics having several advantages over traditional small-molecule therapeutics, further development has been hindered by drug complexity and delivery issues. However, recent progress in deep learning-based protein structure prediction approaches such as AlphaFold opens new opportunities to exploit the complexity of these macro-biomolecules for highly-specialised design to inhibit, regulate or even manipulate specific disease-causing proteins. Anti-CRISPR proteins are small proteins from bacteriophages that counter-defend against the prokaryotic adaptive immunity of CRISPR-Cas systems. They are unique examples of natural protein therapeutics that have been optimized by the host-parasite evolutionary arms race to inhibit a wide variety of host proteins. Here, we show that these Anti-CRISPR proteins display diverse inhibition mechanisms through accurate structural prediction and functional analysis. We find that these phage-derived proteins are extremely distinct in structure, some of which have no homologues in the current protein structure domain. Furthermore, we find a novel family of Anti-CRISPR proteins which are structurally homologous to the recently-discovered mechanism of manipulating host proteins through enzymatic activity, rather than through direct inference. Using highly accurate structure prediction, we present a wide variety of protein-manipulating strategies of anti-CRISPR proteins for future protein drug design.

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Mechanistic Understanding from Molecular Dynamics in Pharmaceutical Research 2: Lipid Membrane in Drug Design

Pharmaceuticals ◽

10.3390/ph14101062 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 14 (10) ◽

pp. 1062

Author(s):

Tomasz Róg ◽

Mykhailo Girych ◽

Alex Bunker

Keyword(s):

Molecular Dynamics ◽

Drug Design ◽

Active Site ◽

Lipid Membranes ◽

Md Simulation ◽

Lipid Membrane ◽

Pharmaceutical Research ◽

Specific Protein ◽

Design Tool ◽

Drug Molecules

We review the use of molecular dynamics (MD) simulation as a drug design tool in the context of the role that the lipid membrane can play in drug action, i.e., the interaction between candidate drug molecules and lipid membranes. In the standard “lock and key” paradigm, only the interaction between the drug and a specific active site of a specific protein is considered; the environment in which the drug acts is, from a biophysical perspective, far more complex than this. The possible mechanisms though which a drug can be designed to tinker with physiological processes are significantly broader than merely fitting to a single active site of a single protein. In this paper, we focus on the role of the lipid membrane, arguably the most important element outside the proteins themselves, as a case study. We discuss work that has been carried out, using MD simulation, concerning the transfection of drugs through membranes that act as biological barriers in the path of the drugs, the behavior of drug molecules within membranes, how their collective behavior can affect the structure and properties of the membrane and, finally, the role lipid membranes, to which the vast majority of drug target proteins are associated, can play in mediating the interaction between drug and target protein. This review paper is the second in a two-part series covering MD simulation as a tool in pharmaceutical research; both are designed as pedagogical review papers aimed at both pharmaceutical scientists interested in exploring how the tool of MD simulation can be applied to their research and computational scientists interested in exploring the possibility of a pharmaceutical context for their research.

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Modeling and synthesis of antiplasmodial chromones, chromanones and chalcones based on natural products of Kenya

Biofarmasi Journal of Natural Product Biochemistry ◽

10.13057/biofar/f160102 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 16 (1) ◽

pp. 8-21

Author(s):

MANYIM SCOLASTICA ◽

ALBERT J. NDAKALA ◽

SOLOMON DERESE

Keyword(s):

Natural Products ◽

Drug Design ◽

Active Site ◽

Docking Studies ◽

Moderate Activity ◽

Vigorous Activity ◽

Structure Based Drug Design ◽

Web Based ◽

Ic50 Values ◽

Accessible Form

Scolastica M, Ndakala AJ, Derese S. 2018. Modeling and synthesis of antiplasmodial chromones, chromanones and chalcones based on natural products of Kenya. Biofarmasi J Nat Prod Biochem 16: 8-21. Despite numerous research that has been done on plants of Kenya resulting in the isolation of thousands of natural products, data on these natural products are not systematically organized in a readily accessible form. This has urged the construction of a web-based database of natural products of Kenya. The database is named Mitishamba and is hosted at http://mitishamba.uonbi.ac.ke. The Mitishamba database was queried for chromones, chromanones, and chalcones that were subjected to structure-based drug design using Fred (OpenEye) docking utility program with 1TV5 PDB structure of the PfDHODH receptor to identify complex of ligands that bind with the active site. Ligand-based drug design (Shape and electrostatics comparison) was also done on the ligands against query A77 1726 (38) (the ligand that co-crystallized with PfDHODH receptor) using ROCS and EON programs, respectively, of OpenEye suite. There was a substantial similarity among the top performing ligands in the docking studies with shape and electrostatic comparison that led to the identification of compounds of interest which were targeted for synthesis and antiplasmodial assay. In this study, a chromanone (7-hydroxy-2-(4-methoxyphenyl) chroman-4-one (48)) and two intermediate chalcones (2',4'-dihydroxy-4-methoxychalcone (45) and 2’,4’-dihydroxy-4-chlorochalcone (47)), were synthesized and subjected to antiplasmodial assay. Among these substances, 45 showed vigorous activity, whereas 47 and 48 had moderate activity against the chloroquine resistant K1 strain of P. falciparum with IC50 values of 4.56±1.66, 17.62 ± 5.94 and 18.01 ±1.66 µg/ml, respectively. Since the synthesized compounds showed antiplasmodial potential, there is a need for further computational refinement of these compounds to optimize their antiplasmodial activity.

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