Prediction of antiviral drugs against African swine fever viruses based on protein-protein interaction analysis

Zhaozhong Zhu; Yunshi Fan; Yang Liu; Taijiao Jiang; Yang Cao; Yousong Peng

doi:10.7717/peerj.8855

Prediction of antiviral drugs against African swine fever viruses based on protein-protein interaction analysis

PeerJ. 2020 Apr 1:8:e8855. doi: 10.7717/peerj.8855. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Zhaozhong Zhu^#¹, Yunshi Fan^#¹, Yang Liu², Taijiao Jiang³, Yang Cao², Yousong Peng¹

Affiliations

¹ College of Biology, Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Medical Virology, Bioinformatics Center, Hunan University, Changsha, China.
² Center of Growth, Metabolism and Aging, Key Laboratory of Bio-Resource and Eco-Environment of Ministry of Education, College of Life Sciences, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China.
³ Center for Systems Medicine, Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, Suzhou Institute of Systems Medicine, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College, Suzhou, China.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

The African swine fever virus (ASFV) has severely influenced the swine industry of the world. Unfortunately, there is currently no effective antiviral drug or vaccine against the virus. Identification of new anti-ASFV drugs is urgently needed. Here, an up-to-date set of protein-protein interactions between ASFV and swine were curated by integration of protein-protein interactions from multiple sources. Thirty-eight swine proteins were observed to interact with ASFVs and were defined as ASFV-interacting swine proteins. The ASFV-interacting swine proteins were found to play a central role in the swine protein-protein interaction network, with significant larger degree, betweenness and smaller shortest path length than other swine proteins. Some of ASFV-interacting swine proteins also interacted with several other viruses and could be taken as potential targets of drugs for broad-spectrum effect, such as HSP90AB1. Finally, the antiviral drugs which targeted ASFV-interacting swine proteins and ASFV proteins were predicted. Several drugs with either broad-spectrum effect or high specificity on ASFV-interacting swine proteins were identified, such as Polaprezinc and Geldanamycin. Structural modeling and molecular dynamics simulation showed that Geldanamycin could bind with swine HSP90AB1 stably. This work could not only deepen our understanding towards the ASFV-swine interactions, but also help for the development of effective antiviral drugs against the ASFVs.

Keywords: ASFV; Drug; Interaction; Network; PPI; Prediction.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Key Plan for Scientific Research and Development of China (2016YFD0500300), the Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (2018JJ3039), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31500126 and 31671371), the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (2016-I2M-1-005), and the funding for prevention and control technology of African swine fever (2018NZ0151). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.