No Arabic abstract
Current drug discovery is expensive and time-consuming. It remains a challenging task to create a wide variety of novel compounds with desirable pharmacological properties and cheaply available to low-income people. In this work, we develop a generative network complex (GNC) to generate new drug-like molecules based on the multi-property optimization via the gradient descent in the latent space of an autoencoder. In our GNC, both multiple chemical properties and similarity scores are optimized to generate and predict drug-like molecules with desired chemical properties. To further validate the reliability of the predictions, these molecules are reevaluated and screened by independent 2D fingerprint-based predictors to come up with a few hundreds of new drug candidates. As a demonstration, we apply our GNC to generate a large number of new BACE1 inhibitors, as well as thousands of novel alternative drug candidates for eight existing market drugs, including Ceritinib, Ribociclib, Acalabrutinib, Idelalisib, Dabrafenib, Macimorelin, Enzalutamide, and Panobinostat.
It remains a challenging task to generate a vast variety of novel compounds with desirable pharmacological properties. In this work, a generative network complex (GNC) is proposed as a new platform for designing novel compounds, predicting their physical and chemical properties, and selecting potential drug candidates that fulfill various druggable criteria such as binding affinity, solubility, partition coefficient, etc. We combine a SMILES string generator, which consists of an encoder, a drug-property controlled or regulated latent space, and a decoder, with verification deep neural networks, a target-specific three-dimensional (3D) pose generator, and mathematical deep learning networks to generate new compounds, predict their drug properties, construct 3D poses associated with target proteins, and reevaluate druggability, respectively. New compounds were generated in the latent space by either randomized output, controlled output, or optimized output. In our demonstration, 2.08 million and 2.8 million novel compounds are generated respectively for Cathepsin S and BACE targets. These new compounds are very different from the seeds and cover a larger chemical space. For potentially active compounds, their 3D poses are generated using a state-of-the-art method. The resulting 3D complexes are further evaluated for druggability by a championing deep learning algorithm based on algebraic topology, differential geometry, and algebraic graph theories. Performed on supercomputers, the whole process took less than one week. Therefore, our GNC is an efficient new paradigm for discovering new drug candidates.
The tertiary structures of functional RNA molecules remain difficult to decipher. A new generation of automated RNA structure prediction methods may help address these challenges but have not yet been experimentally validated. Here we apply four prediction tools to a remarkable class of double glycine riboswitches that exhibit ligand-binding cooperativity. A novel method (BPPalign), RMdetect, JAR3D, and Rosetta 3D modeling give consistent predictions for a new stem P0 and kink-turn motif. These elements structure the linker between the RNAs double aptamers. Chemical mapping on the F. nucleatum riboswitch with SHAPE, DMS, and CMCT probing, mutate-and-map studies, and mutation/rescue experiments all provide strong evidence for the structured linker. Under solution conditions that separate two glycine binding transitions, disrupting this helix-junction-helix structure gives 120-fold and 6- to 30-fold poorer association constants for the two transitions, corresponding to an overall energetic impact of 4.3 pm 0.5 kcal/mol. Prior biochemical and crystallography studies from several labs did not include this critical element due to over-truncation of the RNA. We argue that several further undiscovered elements are likely to exist in the flanking regions of this and other RNA switches, and automated prediction tools can now play a powerful role in their detection and dissection.
The flexibility in gap cost enjoyed by Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) is expected to afford them better retrieval accuracy than position-specific scoring matrices (PSSMs). We attempt to quantify the effect of more general gap parameters by separately examining the influence of position- and composition-specific gap scores, as well as by comparing the retrieval accuracy of the PSSMs constructed using an iterative procedure to that of the HMMs provided by Pfam and SUPERFAMILY, curated ensembles of multiple alignments. We found that position-specific gap penalties have an advantage over uniform gap costs. We did not explore optimizing distinct uniform gap costs for each query. For Pfam, PSSMs iteratively constructed from seeds based on HMM consensus sequences perform equivalently to HMMs that were adjusted to have constant gap transition probabilities, albeit with much greater variance. We observed no effect of composition-specific gap costs on retrieval performance.
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has infected near 5 million people and led to over 0.3 million deaths. Currently, there is no specific anti-SARS-CoV-2 medication. New drug discovery typically takes more than ten years. Drug repositioning becomes one of the most feasible approaches for combating COVID-19. This work curates the largest available experimental dataset for SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-CoV main protease inhibitors. Based on this dataset, we develop validated machine learning models with relatively low root mean square error to screen 1553 FDA-approved drugs as well as other 7012 investigational or off-market drugs in DrugBank. We found that many existing drugs might be potentially potent to SARS-CoV-2. The druggability of many potent SARS-CoV-2 main protease inhibitors is analyzed. This work offers a foundation for further experimental studies of COVID-19 drug repositioning.
The mechanical properties of DNA play a critical role in many biological functions. For example, DNA packing in viruses involves confining the viral genome in a volume (the viral capsid) with dimensions that are comparable to the DNA persistence length. Similarly, eukaryotic DNA is packed in DNA-protein complexes (nucleosomes) in which DNA is tightly bent around protein spools. DNA is also tightly bent by many proteins that regulate transcription, resulting in a variation in gene expression that is amenable to quantitative analysis. In these cases, DNA loops are formed with lengths that are comparable to or smaller than the DNA persistence length. The aim of this review is to describe the physical forces associated with tightly bent DNA in all of these settings and to explore the biological consequences of such bending, as increasingly accessible by single-molecule techniques.