Title
Identifying RO9021 as a Potential Inhibitor of PknG from Mycobacterium tuberculosis: Combinative Computational and in Vitro Studies
Date Issued
14 June 2022
Access level
open access
Resource Type
journal article
Publisher(s)
American Chemical Society
Abstract
Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb). Despite being considered curable and preventable, the increase of antibiotic resistance is becoming a serious public health problem. Mtb is a pathogen capable of surviving in macrophages, causing long-Term latent infection where the mycobacterial serine/threonine protein kinase G (PknG) plays a protective role. Therefore, PknG is an important inhibitory target to prevent Mtb from entering the latency stage. In this study, we use a pharmacophore-based virtual screening and biochemical assays to identify the compound RO9021 (CHEMBL3237561) as a PknG inhibitor. In detail, 1.5 million molecules were screened using a scalable cloud-based setup, identifying 689 candidates, which were further subjected to additional screening employing molecular docking. Molecular docking spotted 62 compounds with estimated binding affinities of-7.54 kcal/mol (s.d. = 0.77 kcal/mol). Finally, 14 compounds were selected for in vitro experiments considering previously reported biological activities and commercial availability. In vitro assays of PknG activity showed that RO9021 inhibits the kinase activity similarly to AX20017, a known inhibitor. The inhibitory effect was found to be dose dependent with a relative IC50value of 4.4 ± 1.1 μM. Molecular dynamics simulations predicted that the PknG-RO9021 complex is stable along the tested timescale. Altogether, our study indicates that RO9021 is a noteworthy drug candidate for further developing new anti-TB drugs that hold excellent reported pharmacokinetic parameters.
Start page
20204
End page
20218
Volume
7
Issue
23
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Enfermedades infecciosas Sistema respiratorio
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85132015408
Source
ACS Omega
ISSN of the container
24701343
Sponsor(s)
This work was funded by the Peruvian Consejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Tecnológica and Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico, Tecnológico y de Innovación Tecnológica to M.Q. during the call for funding “Proyecto Investigación Básica 2019-01” [FONDECYT, 406-2019]. Funding for seed idea and proof of concept was provided by the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (C-19-2019 and C-014-2021-2) to M.Q. This work was supported by grants from the Peruvian Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico, Tecnológico y de Innovación Tecnológica (Grants 154-2017-FONDECYT and 036-2019-FONDECYT-BM-INC.INV) to P.M. We are very thankful to Victor Zegarra for seeding the project and for exploratory experiments setting up protocols for PknG and GarA expression and purification. We especially thank Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) for the computer donation of a PC workstation used in this study, allowing us to perform molecular modeling simulations.
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus