Protease Inhibitors in View of Peptide Substrate Databases

J Chem Inf Model. 2016 Jun 27;56(6):1228-35. doi: 10.1021/acs.jcim.6b00064. Epub 2016 Jun 9.

Abstract

Protease substrate profiling has nowadays almost become a routine task for experimentalists, and the knowledge on protease peptide substrates is easily accessible via the MEROPS database. We present a shape-based virtual screening workflow using vROCS that applies the information about the specificity of the proteases to find new small-molecule inhibitors. Peptide substrate sequences for three to four substrate positions of each substrate from the MEROPS database were used to build the training set. Two-dimensional substrate sequences were converted to three-dimensional conformations through mutation of a template peptide substrate. The vROCS query was built from single amino acid queries for each substrate position considering the relative frequencies of the amino acids. The peptide-substrate-based shape-based virtual screening approach gives good performance for the four proteases thrombin, factor Xa, factor VIIa, and caspase-3 with the DUD-E data set. The results show that the method works for protease targets with different specificity profiles as well as for targets with different active-site mechanisms. As no structure of the target and no information on small-molecule inhibitors are required to use our approach, the method has significant advantages in comparison with conventional structure- and ligand-based methods.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Databases, Pharmaceutical*
  • Drug Evaluation, Preclinical / methods*
  • Ligands
  • Machine Learning*
  • Models, Molecular
  • Peptide Hydrolases / chemistry
  • Peptide Hydrolases / metabolism*
  • Peptides / metabolism*
  • Protease Inhibitors / metabolism*
  • Protease Inhibitors / pharmacology*
  • Protein Conformation
  • Small Molecule Libraries / metabolism
  • Small Molecule Libraries / pharmacology
  • Substrate Specificity
  • User-Computer Interface

Substances

  • Ligands
  • Peptides
  • Protease Inhibitors
  • Small Molecule Libraries
  • Peptide Hydrolases