Design, Synthesis, and Biological Evaluation of Vanillin Hydroxamic Acid Derivatives as Novel Peptide Deformylase Inhibitors.

BACKGROUND: Infectious disease is increasingly hampering human health, which challenge the discovery of new antibacterial target. Peptide deformylase (PDF), a metalloenzyme responsible for catalyzing the removal of the N-formyl group from nascent proteins, was considered as an important target in antibacterial drug discovery. OBJECTIVE: Reported here are the design, synthesis and biological evaluation of vanillin hydroxamic acid derivatives. METHODS AND RESULTS: Analysis of the structure-activity relationships lead to the discovery of compound 8, which exhibits promising antibacterial activity against Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Aspergillus oryzae, and Aspergillus foetidus with the MIC value of 0.32 µg/ml, 0.32 µg/ml, 0.16 µg/ml and 0.16 µg/ml, respectively. Furthermore, molecular docking study was applied to elucidate binding interaction between compound 8 and PDF, which indicate that compound 8 not only shares the same binding pocket with actinonin, but also has a similar binding pattern. In silico pharmacokinetic and toxicity prediction studies also suggested that compound 8 has a relatively high drug score of 0.80, and has no risk of toxicity. CONCLUSION: Compound 8 might represent a promising scaffold for the further development of novel antibacterial drugs.

Ligand and Structure-Based Approaches for the Identification of Peptide Deformylase Inhibitors as Antibacterial Drugs.

Peptide deformylase (PDF) is a metalloprotease catalyzing the removal of a formyl group from newly synthesized proteins, which makes it an important antibacterial drug target. Given the importance of PDF inhibitors like actinonin in antibacterial drug discovery, several reported potent PDF inhibitors were used to develop pharmacophore models using the Galahad module of Sybyl 7.1 software. Generated pharmacophore models were composed of two donor atom centers, four acceptor atom centers and two hydrophobic groups. Model-1 was screened against the Zinc database and several compounds were retrieved as hits. Compounds with Qfit values of more than 60 were employed to perform a molecular docking study with the receptor Escherichia coli PDF, then compounds with docking score values of more than 6 were used to predict the in silico pharmacokinetic and toxicity risk via OSIRIS property explorer. Two known PDF inhibitors were also used to perform a molecular docking study with E. coli PDF as reference molecules. The results of the molecular docking study were validated by reproducing the crystal structure of actinonin. Molecular docking and in silico pharmacokinetic and toxicity prediction studies suggested that ZINC08740166 has a relatively high docking score of 7.44 and a drug score of 0.78.

Structure-Based Drug Design of Small Molecule Peptide Deformylase Inhibitors to Treat Cancer.

Human peptide deformylase (HsPDF) is an important target for anticancer drug discovery. In view of the limited HsPDF, inhibitors were reported, and high-throughput virtual screening (HTVS) studies based on HsPDF for developing new PDF inhibitors remain to be reported. We reported here on diverse small molecule inhibitors with excellent anticancer activities designed based on HTVS and molecular docking studies using the crystal structure of HsPDF. The compound M7594_0037 exhibited potent anticancer activities against HeLa, A549 and MCF-7 cell lines with IC50s of 35.26, 29.63 and 24.63 µM, respectively. Molecular docking studies suggested that M7594_0037 and its three derivatives could interact with HsPDF by several conserved hydrogen bonds. Moreover, the pharmacokinetic and toxicity properties of M7594_0037 and its derivatives were predicted using the OSIRIS property explorer. Thus, M7594_0037 and its derivatives might represent a promising scaffold for the further development of novel anticancer drugs.