Science for Life Laboratory, Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden.
Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB), Department of Experimental and Health Sciences of Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM), Barcelona, Spain.
PLoS Comput Biol. 2020 Mar 13;16(3):e1007680. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007680. eCollection 2020 Mar.
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.
基于配体的 G 蛋白偶联受体(GPCR)药物设计受到可利用的原子分辨率结构数量的限制。我们评估了同源建模在预测两种治疗相关 GPCR 结构中的应用,以及改善针对模型化结合位点的虚拟筛选性能的策略。基于 16 种不同 GPCR 的晶体结构,生成了多巴胺 D2 受体(D2R)和 5-羟色胺 5-HT2A 受体(5-HT2AR)的同源模型。将同源模型与 D2R 和 5-HT2AR 晶体结构进行比较表明,可以获得准确的预测,但不一定使用最相关的模板。虚拟筛选性能的评估基于配体和诱饵的分子对接。结果表明,必须评估几种模板和基于每种模板的多个模型,以确定最佳的结合位点结构。基于胺能 GPCR 的模型显示出对配体的显著富集,并且随着结合位点准确性的提高,虚拟筛选性能呈现出改善的趋势。最佳模型甚至产生了与 D2R 和 5-HT2AR 晶体结构相当或更好的配体富集。探索了考虑结合位点可塑性的方法,以进一步改善预测。与最佳单个结合位点模型相比,对结构集合的分子对接并未提高预测性能,但可以增加虚拟筛选的命中多样性,并且对于已知配体较少的 GPCR 靶标具有优势。分子动力学精修导致结构准确性适度提高,快照的虚拟筛选性能与原始同源模型相当或更差。这些结果为使用 GPCR 同源模型成功进行基于结构的配体发现提供了指导。