Search results for "virtual screening"

Study and identification of new molecular descriptors, finalized to the development of Virtual Screening techniques through the use of deep neural ne…

2022

Inhibition of Eimeria tenella CDK-related kinase 2: From target identification to lead compounds.

2010

Apicomplexan parasites encompass several human- and animal-pathogenic protozoans such as Plasmodium falciparum, Toxoplasma gondii, and Eimeria tenella. E. tenella causes coccidiosis, a disease that afflicts chickens, leading to tremendous economic losses to the global poultry industry. The considerable increase in drug resistance makes it necessary to develop new therapeutic strategies against this parasite. Cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs) are key molecules in cell-cycle regulation and are therefore prominent target proteins in parasitic diseases. Bioinformatics analysis revealed four potential CDK-like proteins, of which one—E. tenella CDK-related kinase 2 (EtCRK2)—has already been charact…

Identification In Silico and In Vitro of Novel Trypanosomicidal Drug-Like Compounds

2012

Atom-based bilinear indices and linear discriminant analysis are used to discover novel trypanosomicidal compounds. The obtained linear discriminant analysis-based quantitative structure–activity relationship models, using non-stochastic and stochastic indices, provide accuracies of 89.02% (85.11%) and 89.60% (88.30%) of the chemicals in the training (test) sets, respectively. Later, both models were applied to the virtual screening of 18 in-house synthesized compounds to find new pro-lead antitrypanosomal agents. The in vitro antitrypanosomal activity of this set against epimastigote forms of Trypanosoma cruzi is assayed. Predictions agree with experimental results to a great extent (16/18…

New agents active against Mycobacterium avium complex selected by molecular topology: a virtual screening method

2003

Objectives: In order to select new drugs and to predict their in vitro activity against Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC), new quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) models were developed. Methods: The activities against MAC of 29 structurally heterogeneous drugs were examined by means of linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and multilinear regression analysis (MLRA) by using topological indices (TI) as structural descriptors. In vitro antimycobacterial activities were determined by a broth microdilution method with 7H9 medium. Results: The topological model obtained successfully classifies over 80% of compounds as active or inactive; consequently, it was applied in the search fo…

3D-QSAR pharmacophore modeling and in silico screening of new Bcl-xl inhibitors.

2010

Bcl-2 proteins family members play several roles in tumoral proliferation: they inhibit proapoptotic activity during oncogenesis, support tumor cells survival, induce chemoresistance. The discovery of new small inhibitors of Bcl-xl represents a new frontier for cancer treatment. In this study, a 3D-QSAR pharmacophore model was developed, based on 42 biarylacylsulfonamides, and used to understand the structural factors affecting the inhibitory potency of these derivatives. Aromatic, negative charge, and hydrogen bond acceptor effects contribute to the inhibitory activity. The model was then employed as 3D search query to screen ZINC drug-like database in order to select new scaffolds. Finall…

Fragment- and negative image-based screening of phosphodiesterase 10A inhibitors.

2019

A novel virtual screening methodology called fragment- and negative image-based (F-NiB) screening is introduced and tested experimentally using phosphodiesterase 10A (PDE10A) as a case study. Potent PDE10A-specific small-molecule inhibitors are actively sought after for their antipsychotic and neuroprotective effects. The F-NiB combines features from both fragment-based drug discovery and negative image-based (NIB) screening methodologies to facilitate rational drug discovery. The selected structural parts of protein-bound ligand(s) are seamlessly combined with the negative image of the target's ligand-binding cavity. This cavity- and fragment-based hybrid model, namely its shape and electr…

Bond-Based 2D Quadratic Fingerprints in QSAR Studies: Virtual and In vitro Tyrosinase Inhibitory Activity Elucidation

2010

In this report, we show the results of quantitative structure–activity relationship (QSAR) studies of tyrosinase inhibitory activity, by using the bond-based quadratic indices as molecular descriptors (MDs) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA), to generate discriminant functions to predict the anti-tyrosinase activity. The best two models [Eqs (6) and (12)] out of the total 12 QSAR models developed here show accuracies of 93.51% and 91.21%, as well as high Matthews correlation coefficients (C) of 0.86 and 0.82, respectively, in the training set. The validation external series depicts values of 90.00% and 89.44% for these best two equations (6) and (12), respectively. Afterwards, a second …

Inside Cover: Inhibition of Eimeria tenella CDK-Related Kinase 2: From Target Identification to Lead Compounds (ChemMedChem 8/2010)

2010

Extracellular loop 2 of G protein-coupled olfactory receptors is critical for odorant recognition

2021

International audience; G protein-coupled olfactory receptors (ORs) enable us to detect innumerous odorants. They are also ectopically expressed in non-olfactory tissues and emerging as attractive drug targets. ORs can be promiscuous or highly specific, which is part of a larger mechanism for odor discrimination. Here, we demonstrate that the OR extracellular loop 2 (ECL2) plays critical roles in OR promiscuity and specificity. Using site-directed mutagenesis and molecular modeling, we constructed 3D OR models in which ECL2 forms a lid over the orthosteric pocket. We demonstrate using molecular dynamics simulations that ECL2 controls the shape and the volume of the odorant-binding pocket, m…

Getting Docking into Shape Using Negative Image-Based Rescoring

2019

The failure of default scoring functions to ensure virtual screening enrichment is a persistent problem for the molecular docking algorithms used in the structure-based drug discovery. To remedy this problem, elaborate rescoring and post-processing schemes have been developed with a varying degree of success, specificity, and cost. The negative imagebased rescoring (R-NiB) has been shown to improve the flexible docking performance markedly with a variety of drug targets.The yield improvement is achieved by comparing the alternative docking poses against the negative image of the target protein’s ligand-binding cavity. In other words, the shape and electrostatics of the binding pocket is dir…