Biomedical subjects

Ian J Tickle

Publications and source records attributed to Ian J Tickle.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Automated protein-ligand crystallography for structure-based drug design.

An approach to automate protein-ligand crystallography is presented, with the aim of increasing the number of structures available to structure-based drug design. The methods we propose deal with the automatic interpretation of diffraction data for targets with known protein structures, and provide easy access to the results. Central to the system is a novel procedure that fully automates the placement of ligands into electron density maps. Automation provides an objective way to structure solution, whereas manual placement can be rather subjective, especially for data of low to medium resolution. Ligands are placed by docking into electron density, whilst taking care of protein-ligand interactions. The ligand fitting procedure has been validated on both public domain and in-house examples. Some of the latter deal with cocktails of low-molecular weight compounds, as used in fragment-based drug discovery by crystallography. For such library-screening experiments we show that the method can automatically identify which of the compounds from a cocktail is bound.

Crystallography, X-Ray↗

PubMed2005

Fragment-based lead discovery using X-ray crystallography.

Fragment screening offers an alternative to traditional screening for discovering new leads in drug discovery programs. This paper describes a fragment screening methodology based on high throughput X-ray crystallography. The method is illustrated against five proteins (p38 MAP kinase, CDK2, thrombin, ribonuclease A, and PTP1B). The fragments identified have weak potency (>100 microM) but are efficient binders relative to their size and may therefore represent suitable starting points for evolution to good quality lead compounds. The examples illustrate that a range of molecular interactions (i.e., lipophilic, charge-charge, neutral hydrogen bonds) can drive fragment binding and also that fragments can induce protein movement. We believe that the method has great potential for the discovery of novel lead compounds against a range of targets, and the companion paper illustrates how lead compounds have been identified for p38 MAP kinase starting from fragments such as those described in this paper.

CDC2-CDC28 Kinases↗

PubMed2004

Crystal structures of human cytochrome P450 3A4 bound to metyrapone and progesterone.

Cytochromes P450 (P450s) metabolize a wide range of endogenous compounds and xenobiotics, such as pollutants, environmental compounds, and drug molecules. The microsomal, membrane-associated, P450 isoforms CYP3A4, CYP2D6, CYP2C9, CYP2C19, CYP2E1, and CYP1A2 are responsible for the oxidative metabolism of more than 90% of marketed drugs. Cytochrome P450 3A4 (CYP3A4) metabolizes more drug molecules than all other isoforms combined. Here we report three crystal structures of CYP3A4: unliganded, bound to the inhibitor metyrapone, and bound to the substrate progesterone. The structures revealed a surprisingly small active site, with little conformational change associated with the binding of either compound. An unexpected peripheral binding site is identified, located above a phenylalanine cluster, which may be involved in the initial recognition of substrates or allosteric effectors.

Binding Sites↗

PubMed2003

Estimation of weights and validation: a marginal likelihood approach.

The estimation of weights is quite an important aspect of the restrained refinement of macromolecular structures and related procedures such as the estimation of coordinate errors and structure validation using geometrical criteria. In principle, the method of maximum likelihood can be used for estimation of both atomic and weighting parameters. However, the low observation-to-parameter ratio in macromolecular refinement makes this kind of estimate of weighting parameters seriously biased; thus, the weighting parameters have traditionally been estimated separately from atomic parameters using a special technique, such as minimizing the free R factor. However, the variance of the latter estimate is large, as only a small portion of all data is used. In this work, an estimator of weights is proposed which is based on an approximation of a marginal likelihood function of the weighting parameters and which uses all the X-ray data. There is a known true value for the overall scaling coefficient for distance variances in restrained refinement and therefore the (maximum-likelihood) estimator for this coefficient may be used as a validation statistic.

Crystallography, X-Ray↗

PubMed2002

Engineering of an intersubunit disulfide bridge in the iron-superoxide dismutase of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

With the aim of enhancing interactions involved in dimer formation, an intersubunit disulfide bridge was engineered in the superoxide dismutase enzyme of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Ser-123 was chosen for mutation to cysteine since it resides at the dimer interface where the serine side chain interacts with the same residue in the opposite subunit. Gel electrophoresis and X-ray crystallographic studies of the expressed mutant confirmed formation of the disulfide bond under nonreducing conditions. However, the mutant protein was found to be less stable than the wild type as judged by susceptibility to denaturation in the presence of guanidine hydrochloride. Decreased stability probably results from formation of a disulfide bridge with a suboptimal torsion angle and exclusion of solvent molecules from the dimer interface.

Cloning, Molecular↗

PubMed2002

Sensitivity of molecular docking to induced fit effects in influenza virus neuraminidase.

Many proteins undergo small side chain or even backbone movements on binding of different ligands into the same protein structure. This is known as induced fit and is potentially problematic for virtual screening of databases against protein targets. In this report we investigate the limits of the rigid protein approximation used by the docking program, GOLD, through cross-docking using protein structures of influenza neuraminidase. Neuraminidase is known to exhibit small but significant induced fit effects on ligand binding. Some neuraminidase crystal structures caused concern due to the bound ligand conformation and GOLD performed poorly on these complexes. A 'clean' set, which contained unique, unambiguous complexes, was defined. For this set, the lowest energy structure was correctly docked (i.e. RMSD < 1.5 A away from the crystal reference structure) in 84% of proteins, and the most promiscuous protein (1mwe) was able to dock all 15 ligands accurately including those that normally required an induced fit movement. This is considerably better than the 70% success rate seen with GOLD against general validation sets. Inclusion of specific water molecules involved in water-mediated hydrogen bonds did not significantly improve the docking performance for ligands that formed water-mediated contacts but it did prevent docking of ligands that displaced these waters. Our data supports the use of a single protein structure for virtual screening with GOLD in some applications involving induced fit effects, although care must be taken to identify the protein structure that performs best against a wide variety of ligands. The performance of GOLD was significantly better than the GOLD implementation of ChemScore and the reasons for this are discussed. Overall, GOLD has shown itself to be an extremely good, robust docking program for this system.

Algorithms↗