Performance of virtual screening against GPCR homology models: Impact of template selection and treatment of binding site plasticity

PLoS Comput Biol. 2020 Mar 13;16(3):e1007680. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007680. eCollection 2020 Mar.

Abstract

Rational drug design for G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) is limited by the small number of available atomic resolution structures. We assessed the use of homology modeling to predict the structures of two therapeutically relevant GPCRs and strategies to improve the performance of virtual screening against modeled binding sites. Homology models of the D2 dopamine (D2R) and serotonin 5-HT2A receptors (5-HT2AR) were generated based on crystal structures of 16 different GPCRs. Comparison of the homology models to D2R and 5-HT2AR crystal structures showed that accurate predictions could be obtained, but not necessarily using the most closely related template. Assessment of virtual screening performance was based on molecular docking of ligands and decoys. The results demonstrated that several templates and multiple models based on each of these must be evaluated to identify the optimal binding site structure. Models based on aminergic GPCRs showed substantial ligand enrichment and there was a trend toward improved virtual screening performance with increasing binding site accuracy. The best models even yielded ligand enrichment comparable to or better than that of the D2R and 5-HT2AR crystal structures. Methods to consider binding site plasticity were explored to further improve predictions. Molecular docking to ensembles of structures did not outperform the best individual binding site models, but could increase the diversity of hits from virtual screens and be advantageous for GPCR targets with few known ligands. Molecular dynamics refinement resulted in moderate improvements of structural accuracy and the virtual screening performance of snapshots was either comparable to or worse than that of the raw homology models. These results provide guidelines for successful application of structure-based ligand discovery using GPCR homology models.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Binding Sites*
  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Crystallization
  • Drug Design
  • Humans
  • Ligands
  • Molecular Docking Simulation*
  • Protein Binding
  • Receptors, G-Protein-Coupled* / chemistry
  • Receptors, G-Protein-Coupled* / genetics
  • Receptors, G-Protein-Coupled* / metabolism
  • Structural Homology, Protein*

Substances

  • Ligands
  • Receptors, G-Protein-Coupled

Associated data

  • Dryad/10.5061/dryad.xwdbrv19m

Grants and funding

This project was supported by grants from the Swedish Research Council (2017-4676), the Swedish strategic research program eSSENCE, the Science for Life Laboratory, and the Åke Wiberg and Göran Gustafsson foundations to J.C. Computational resources were provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC). J.S. acknowledges financial support from the Instituto de Salud Carlos III FEDER (PI15/00460 & PI18/00094) and the NEURON-ERANET (AC18/00030). I. R.-E. thanks the Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) for its support. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.