Search results for "DOCKING"

Decipher the mechanisms of protein conformational changes induced by nucleotide binding through free-energy landscape analysis: ATP binding to Hsp70.

2013

ATP regulates the function of many proteins in the cell by transducing its binding and hydrolysis energies into protein conformational changes by mechanisms which are challenging to identify at the atomic scale. Based on molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, a method is proposed to analyze the structural changes induced by ATP binding to a protein by computing the effective free-energy landscape (FEL) of a subset of its coordinates along its amino-acid sequence. The method is applied to characterize the mechanism by which the binding of ATP to the nucleotide-binding domain (NBD) of Hsp70 propagates a signal to its substrate-binding domain (SBD). Unbiased MD simulations were performed for Hsp…

Lead Discovery of SARS-CoV-2 Main Protease Inhibitors through Covalent Docking-Based Virtual Screening

2021

During almost all 2020, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has constituted the major risk for the worldwide health and economy, propelling unprecedented efforts to discover drugs for its prevention and cure. At the end of the year, these efforts have culminated with the approval of vaccines by the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) giving new hope for the future. On the other hand, clinical data underscore the urgent need for effective drugs to treat COVID-19 patients. In this work, we embarked on a virtual screening campaign against the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Mpro chymotrypsin-like cysteine pro…

Comparison of virtual high-throughput screening methods for the identification of phosphodiesterase-5 inhibitors.

2011

Reliable and effective virtual high-throughput screening (vHTS) methods are desperately needed to minimize the expenses involved in drug discovery projects. Here, we present an improvement to the negative image-based (NIB) screening: the shape, the electrostatics, and the solvation state of the target protein’s ligand-binding site are included into the vHTS. Additionally, the initial vHTS results are postprocessed with molecular mechanics/generalized Born surface area (MMGBSA) calculations to estimate the favorability of ligand-protein interactions. The results show that docking produces very good early enrichment for phosphodiesterase-5 (PDE-5); however, in general, the NIB and the ligand-…

Principal component analysis on molecular descriptors as an alternative point of view in the search of new Hsp90 inhibitors

2009

Inhibiting a protein that regulates multiple signal transduction pathways in cancer cells is an attractive goal for cancer therapy. Heat shock protein 90 (Hsp90) is one of the most promising molecular targets for such an approach. In fact, Hsp90 is a ubiquitous molecular chaperone protein that is involved in folding, activating and assembling of many key mediators of signal transduction, cellular growth, differentiation, stress-response and apoptothic pathways. With the aim to analyze which molecular descriptors have the higher importance in the binding interactions of these classes, we first performed molecular docking experiments on the 187 Hsp90 inhibitors included in the BindingDB, a pu…

Cytotoxicity of cardiotonic steroids in sensitive and multidrug-resistant leukemia cells and the link with Na(+)/K(+)-ATPase.

2015

Cardiotonic steroids have long been in clinical use for treatment of heart failure and are now emerging as promising agents in various diseases, especially cancer. Their main target is Na(+)/K(+)-ATPase, a membrane protein involved in cellular ion homeostasis. Na(+)/K(+)-ATPase has been implicated in cancer biology by affecting several cellular events and signaling pathways in both sensitive and drug-resistant cancer cells. Hence, we investigated the cytotoxic activities of 66 cardiotonic steroids and cardiotonic steroid derivatives in sensitive CCRF-CEM and multidrug-resistant CEM/ADR5000 leukemia cells. Data were then subjected to quantitative structure-activity relationship analysis (QSA…

Oxidation of dobutamine and dopamine by horseradish peroxidase

2022

Dobutamine and dopamine have been previously shown to interfere with enzymatic diagnostic tests and different mechanisms responsible for this effect have been postulated. We have studied the oxidation by horseradish peroxidase (HRP) of dopamine, dobutamine, and its analog with the phenol group blocked by methylation. Oxidation of dobutamine was much faster than dopamine, as reported before, whereas the methylated analog of dobutamine was oxidized at intermediate rate. This demonstrates that the phenol group in dobutamine is oxidized preferentially by HRP and acts as an electron-transfer mediator in oxidation of the catechol group. Different oxidation rates of catechol groups in dopamine and…

Nuovi derivati della Dopamina nell’Addiction da sostanze d’abuso: studi preclinici su modelli sperimentali murini

Studies on a new potential dopaminergic agent: in vitro BBB permeability, in vivo behavioural effects and molecular docking evaluation.

2015

2-Amino-N-[2-(3,4-dihydroxy-phenyl)-ethyl]-3-phenyl-propionamide (DA-PHEN) has been previously synthesized to obtain a potential prodrug capable of release dopamine (DA) into CNS. However, DA-PHEN could act per se as a dopaminergic drug. In this study, the permeability transport (Pe), obtained by parallel artificial permeability assay (PAMPA), indicated a low passive transcellular transport (Pe = 0.32 ± 0.01 × 10(-6 )cm/s). Using the Caco-2 cell system, the Papp AP-BL in absorptive direction (3.36 ± 0.02 × 10(-5 )cm/s) was significantly higher than the Papp BL-AP in secretive direction (1.75 ± 0.07 × 10(-5 )cm/s), suggesting a polarized transport. The efflux ratio (Papp AP-BL/Papp BL-AP = 0…

Synthesis of N-acyl Derivatives of Aminocombretastatin A-4 and Study of their Interaction with Tubulin and Downregulation of c-Myc.

2021

11 p.-9 fig.-4 tab.

Protocol for rational design of covalently interacting inhibitors.

2014

The inhibition potencies of covalent inhibitors mainly result from the formation of a covalent bond to the enzyme during the inhibition mechanism. This class of inhibitors has essentially been ignored in previous target-directed drug discovery projects because of concerns about possible side effects. However, their advantages, such as higher binding energies and longer drug-target residence times moved them into the focus of recent investigations. While the rational design of non-covalent inhibitors became standard the corresponding design of covalent inhibitors is still in its early stages. Potent covalent inhibitors can be retrieved from large compound libraries by covalent docking approa…