Influence of charge configuration on substrate binding to SARS-CoV-2 main protease

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Díaz ◽  
Dimas Suárez

Computer simulations describe the substrate binding ability of two alternative protonation states for the 3CLpro active site.

Coronaviruses ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 02 ◽  
Author(s):  
Prachi Singh ◽  
Ardra P ◽  
Hariprasad V.R. ◽  
Babu U.V. ◽  
Mohamed Rafiq ◽  
...  

Background: The recent outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has raised a global health concern due to the unavailability of any vaccines or drugs. The repurposing of traditional herbs with broad-spectrum anti-viral activity can be explored to control or prevent a pandemic. Objective: The 3-chymotrypsin-like main protease (3CLpro), also referred to as the “Achilles’ heel” of the coronaviruses (CoVs), is highly conserved among CoVs and is a potential drug target. 3CLpro is essential for the virus’s life cycle. The objective of the study was to screen and identify broad-spectrum natural phytoconstituents against the conserved active site and substrate-binding site of 3CLpro of HCoVs. Methods: Herein, we applied the computational strategy based on molecular docking to identify potential phytoconstituents for the non-covalent inhibition of the main protease 3CLpro from four different CoVs, namely, SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV, HCoV-HKU1, and HCoV-229E. Results: Our study shows that natural phytoconstituents in Triphala (a blend of Emblica Officinalis fruit, Terminalia bellerica fruit, and Terminalia chebula fruit), namely chebulagic acid, chebulinic acid, and elagic acid, exhibited the highest binding affinity and lowest dissociation constants (Ki), against the conserved 3CLpro main protease of SARSCoV-2, SARS-CoV, HCoV-HKU1, and HCoV-229E. Besides, phytoconstituents of other herbs like Withania somnifera, Glycyrrhiza glabra, Hyssopus officinalis, Camellia sinensis, Prunella vulgaris, and Ocimum sanctum also showed good binding affinity and lower Ki against the active site of 3CLpro. The top-ranking phytoconstituents’ binding interactions clearly showed a strong and stable interactions with amino acid residues in the catalytic dyad (CYS-HIS) and substrate-binding pocket of the 3CLpro main proteases. Conclusion: This study provides a valuable scaffold for repurposing traditional herbs with anti-CoV activity to combat SARS-CoV-2 and other HCoVs until the discovery of new therapies.


Processes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 1004
Author(s):  
Mahmoud A. El Hassab ◽  
Mohamed Fares ◽  
Mohammed K. Abdel-Hamid Amin ◽  
Sara T. Al-Rashood ◽  
Amal Alharbi ◽  
...  

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.


2015 ◽  
Vol 418 ◽  
pp. 50-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shijia Liu ◽  
Shangjin Shao ◽  
Linlin Li ◽  
Zhi Cheng ◽  
Li Tian ◽  
...  

2008 ◽  
Vol 48 (supplement) ◽  
pp. S40
Author(s):  
Keisuke Sakurai ◽  
Katsuyoshi Harada ◽  
Kunitoshi Shimokata ◽  
Takashi Hayashi ◽  
Hideo Shimada

2014 ◽  
Vol 70 (a1) ◽  
pp. C1207-C1207
Author(s):  
Leighton Coates

β-lactam antibiotics have been used effectively over several decades against many types of highly virulent bacteria. The predominant cause of resistance to these antibiotics in Gram-negative bacterial pathogens is the production of serine β-lactamase enzymes. A key aspect of the class A serine β-lactamase mechanism that remains unresolved and controversial is the identity of the residue acting as the catalytic base during the acylation reaction. Multiple mechanisms have been proposed for the formation of the acyl-enzyme intermediate that are predicated on understanding the protonation states and hydrogen-bonding interactions among the important residues involved in substrate binding and catalysis of these enzymes. For resolving a controversy of this nature surrounding the catalytic mechanism, neutron crystallography is a powerful complement to X-ray crystallography that can explicitly determine the location of deuterium atoms in proteins, thereby directly revealing the hydrogen-bonding interactions of important amino acid residues. Neutron crystallography was used to unambiguously reveal the ground-state active site protonation states and the resulting hydrogen-bonding network in two ligand-free Toho-1 β-lactamase mutants which provided remarkably clear pictures of the active site region prior to substrate binding and subsequent acylation [1,2] and an acylation transition-state analog, benzothiophene-2-boronic acid (BZB), which was also isotopically enriched with 11B. The neutron structure revealed the locations of all deuterium atoms in the active site region and clearly indicated that Glu166 is protonated in the BZB transition-state analog complex. As a result, the complete hydrogen-bonding pathway throughout the active site region could then deduced for this protein-ligand complex that mimics the acylation tetrahedral intermediate [3].


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