Virtual Screening Expands the Non-Natural Amino Acid Palette for Peptide Optimization

J Chem Inf Model. 2022 Jun 27;62(12):2999-3007. doi: 10.1021/acs.jcim.2c00193. Epub 2022 Jun 14.

Abstract

Peptides are an important modality in drug discovery. While current peptide optimization focuses predominantly on the small number of natural and commercially available non-natural amino acids, the chemical spaces available for small molecule drug discovery are in the billions of molecules. In the present study, we describe the development of a large virtual library of readily synthesizable non-natural amino acids that can power the virtual screening protocols and aid in peptide optimization. To that end, we enumerated nearly 380 thousand amino acids and demonstrated their vast chemical diversity compared to the 20 natural and commercial residues. Furthermore, we selected a diverse ten thousand amino acid subset to validate our virtual screening workflow on the Keap1-Neh2 complex model system. Through in silico mutations of Neh2 peptide residues to those from the virtual library, our docking-based protocol identified a number of possible solutions with a significantly higher predicted affinity toward the Keap1 protein. This protocol demonstrates that the non-natural amino acid chemical space can be massively extended and virtually screened with a reasonable computational cost.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Amino Acids* / chemistry
  • Drug Discovery / methods
  • Kelch-Like ECH-Associated Protein 1
  • Molecular Docking Simulation
  • NF-E2-Related Factor 2*
  • Peptides / chemistry

Substances

  • Amino Acids
  • Kelch-Like ECH-Associated Protein 1
  • NF-E2-Related Factor 2
  • Peptides