Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to R S Bohacek.
The unusual amino acid bishomoallylglycine was synthesized and used to form cyclic P3-P1 tripeptide inhibitors via a Grubbs olefin metathesis method. These compounds show micro- to nanomolar inhibition of Rhizopus chinensis pepsin and represent a new class of simplified aspartic protease inhibitors lacking P' residues.
During 1996 and 1997, the first reports were disclosed of active enzyme inhibitors based entirely on novel structures created by de novo methods. De novo methods have also been used to modify and significantly improve the binding affinity of an HIV protease inhibitor. Work continues in the improvement of methods for the de novo design of compounds which fit and chemically complement a binding site. De novo algorithms that generate only synthetically feasible structures have also been reported. In addition, methods are being developed for the automatic computer generation of virtual molecular libraries which can be searched to identify molecules to match a pharmacophore or fit into a binding site.
New methods for docking, template fitting and building pseudo-receptors are described. Full conformational searches are carried out for flexible cyclic and acyclic molecules. QXP (quick explore) search algorithms are derived from the method of Monte Carlo perturbation with energy minimization in Cartesian space. An additional fast search step is introduced between the initial perturbation and energy minimization. The fast search produces approximate low-energy structures, which are likely to minimize to a low energy. For template fitting, QXP uses a superposition force field which automatically assigns short-range attractive forces to similar atoms in different molecules. The docking algorithms were evaluated using X-ray data for 12 protein-ligand complexes. The ligands had up to 24 rotatable bonds and ranged from highly polar to mostly nonpolar. Docking searches of the randomly disordered ligands gave rms differences between the lowest energy docked structure and the energy-minimized X-ray structure, of less than 0.76 A for 10 of the ligands. For all the ligands, the rms difference between the energy-minimized X-ray structure and the closest docked structure was less than 0.4 A, when parts of one of the molecules which are in the solvent were excluded from the rms calculation. Template fitting was tested using four ACE inhibitors. Three ACE templates have been previously published. A single run using QXP generated a series of templates which contained examples of each of the three. A pseudo-receptor, complementary to an ACE template, was built out of small molecules, such as pyrrole, cyclopentanone and propane. When individually energy minimized in the pseudo-receptor, each of the four ACE inhibitors moved with an rms of less than 0.25 A. After random perturbation, the inhibitors were docked into the pseudo-receptor. Each lowest energy docked structure matched the energy-minimized geometry with an rms of less than 0.08 A. Thus, the pseudo-receptor shows steric and chemical complementarity to all four molecules. The QXP program is reliable, easy to use and sufficiently rapid for routine application in structure-based drug design.
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A computer procedure TFIT, which uses a molecular superposition force field to flexibly match test compounds to a 3D pharmacophore, was evaluated to find out whether it could reliably predict the bioactive conformations of flexible ligands. The program superposition force field optimizes the overlap of those atoms of the test ligand and template that are of similar chemical type, by applying an attractive force between atoms of the test ligand and template which are close together and of similar type (hydrogen bonding, charge, hydrophobicity). A procedure involving Monte Carlo torsion perturbations, followed by torsional energy minimization, is used to find conformations of the test ligand which cominimize the internal energy of the ligand and the superposition energy of ligand and template. The procedure was tested by applying it to a series of flexible ligands for which the bioactive conformation was known experimentally. The 15 molecules tested were inhibitors of thermolysin, HIV-1 protease or endothiapepsin for which X-ray structures of the bioactive conformation were available. For each enzyme, one of the molecules served as a template and the others, after being conformationally randomized, were fitted. The fitted conformation was then compared to the known binding geometry. The matching procedure was successful in predicting the bioactive conformations of many of the structures tested. Significant deviation from experimental results was found only for parts of molecules where it was readily apparent that the template did not contain sufficient information to accurately determine the bioactive conformation.
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The conformations of cyclo(-D-Trp-D-Asp-Pro-D-Val-Leu-) in dimethyl sulfoxide-d6 (DMSO-d6) and water were determined using two-dimensional nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and restrained molecular dynamics. Comparisons were made between conformations of the cyclic pentapeptide in both solvents. The NMR study revealed that, while the backbone remained relatively unchanged in both solvents, the side-chains adopted distinctly different orientations in DMSO-d6 vs. H2O. A modeling study, minus NOE constraints, produced a set of low-energy conformers possessing agreement in backbone conformation with the NMR-derived structures; however, lowest-energy conformers did not have this agreement. These results show that different solvents can significantly affect the preferred side-chain conformation of small cyclic peptides in solution. This finding will impact the selection of solvent when determining structures for use as templates in rational drug design.
A potent macrocyclic inhibitor of neutral endopeptidase (NEP) 24.11 was designed using a computer model of the active site of thermolysin. This 10-membered ring lactam represents a general mimic for any hydrophobic dipeptide in which the two amino acid side chains bind to an enzyme in a contiguous orientation. The parent 10-membered ring lactam was synthesized and exhibited excellent potency as an NEP 24.11 inhibitor (IC50 = 3 nM). In order to improve oral bioavailability, various functionality was attached to the macrocycle. These modifications lead to CGS 25155, an orally active NEP 24.11 inhibitor that slows down the degradation of the cardiac hormone atrial natriuretic factor, producing a lowering of blood pressure in the DOCA-salt rat model of hypertension.
The accessible surface, described by Lee and Richards (the L&R surface: J. Mol. Biol. 1971, 55, 379), has remarkably useful properties for displaying ligand-protein interactions. The surface is placed one van der Waals radius plus one probe radius away from the protein atoms. The ligands are displayed in skeletal form. With a suitable probe radius, those parts of the ligand in good van der Waals contact with the protein binding site are found superimposed on the L&R surface. Display of the surface using parallel contours therefore provides a very powerful guide for interactive drug design because only ligand atoms lying on or close to the surface are in low-energy contact. The ability of the surface to accurately display steric complementarity between ligands and proteins was optimized using data from small molecule crystal structures. The possibility of displaying the chemical specificity of the binding site was also investigated. The surface can be colored to give precise information about chemical specificity. Electrostatic potential, electrostatic gradient, and distance to hydrogen-bonding groups were tested as methods of displaying chemical specificity. The ability of these methods to describe the complementarity actually observed in the interior of proteins was compared. High-resolution crystal data for ribonuclease and trypsin was used. The environment surrounding extended peptide chains in the protein was treated as a virtual binding site. The peptide chain served as a virtual ligand. This large sample of experimental data was used to measure the correlation between type of ligand atom and the calculated property of the nearest binding site surface. The best correlation was obtained using hydrogen-bonding properties of the binding site. Using this parameter the surface could be divided into three separate zones representing the hydrophobic, hydrogen-bond-acceptor, and hydrogen-bond-donor properties of the binding site. The percentage of hydrophobic ligand atoms found to lie closest to the hydrophobic protein surface was 91%. The equivalent scores for ligand hydrogen-acceptor atoms and hydrogen-donor atoms found at the corresponding complementarity zone were 94% and 91%. The surface zones can be readily displayed using three colors. To test the method on real ligand/binding site interactions, nine thermolysin-inhibitor complexes of known structure were evaluated using the parameters and criteria derived from the protein-packing study and a correlation between complementary contacts and logarithm of potency was obtained which had an r2 of 0.99.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
This paper presents a method for the rapid computation of approximate molecular van der Waals volumes and their subsequent display. The procedure relies on bit representation of individual volume elements that are mapped into an array that stores the total molecular volume. Our method differs from previously described algorithms in its use of bit-encoded templates that define atomic van der Waals radii. For each atom in the molecule, for which the volume is to be computed, the relevant template is mapped into a bit array with an offset corresponding to the appropriate atomic position. Bit-wise Boolean operations can be used for volume comparisons (e.g., common volume and excluded volume). An algorithm for the graphical display of the molecular surface encompassing the computed volumes is also described. The speed of the method enables users to perform volume computations in a reasonable period of time with VAX-class computers on molecules containing as many as several hundred atoms.
A statistical study of amino acid side chain contact interactions was carried out using a data set based on 36 protein structures. For each type of amino acid, a distribution of per-residue inter-side-chain contacts was obtained, over the observed span of zero to 11 contacts per residue. Significant observations included the following: 1) The mean number of inter-side-chain contacts is proportional to side chain surface area with the exception of Lys and Arg. 2) The mean number of contacts was greater for amino acids in beta-sheet relative to alpha-helical regions. 3) The more polar or surface-loving amino acids exhibited non-normal distributions, whereas distributions for the non-polar or interior-loving amino acids fell within accepted limits of normality.
A method is described for estimating the amino acid side chain functional groups most likely to occur at a receptor site (or other protein-type binding site) given a particular peptide hormone sequence. The predictions are based on mutual affinities of amino acid side chains, as manifested in the frequencies of side chain contacts occurring in proteins. The relative merits of various measures of these affinities are discussed, and a new set of contact frequency data based on 36 proteins (coordinate data taken from the Brookhaven Protein Data Bank) is presented. Evaluation of predictions was carried out using subunit-subunit interfaces as models for peptide-receptor association; accuracy of guesses was found to be 3-4 times better than random, according to this measure. Computer programs for carrying out all requisite data manipulations are described.