Teaching Cheminformatics through a Collaborative Intercollegiate Online Chemistry Course (OLCC).

While cheminformatics skills necessary for dealing with an ever-increasing amount of chemical information are considered important for students pursuing STEM careers in the age of big data, many schools do not offer a cheminformatics course or alternative training opportunities. This paper presents the Cheminformatics Online Chemistry Course (OLCC), which is organized and run by the Committee on Computers in Chemical Education (CCCE) of the American Chemical Society (ACS)'s Division of Chemical Education (CHED). The Cheminformatics OLCC is a highly collaborative teaching project involving instructors at multiple schools who teamed up with external chemical information experts recruited across sectors, including government and industry. From 2015 to 2019, three Cheminformatics OLCCs were offered. In each program, the instructors at participating schools would meet face-to-face with the students of a class, while external content experts engaged through online discussions across campuses with both the instructors and students. All the material created in the course has been made available at the open education repositories of LibreTexts and CCCE Web sites for other institutions to adapt to their future needs.

Model of human butyrylcholinesterase tetramer by homology modeling and dynamics simulation.

A mutant of human butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) with high activity against cocaine would be highly promising as a drug for therapeutic treatment of cocaine abuse and overdose. It is desirable to design a recombinant BChE mutant with a long half-life in human circulation. Studies showed that BChE subunits can be assembled by a peptide containing the proline-rich attachment domain (PRAD) to form a stable tetramer. The models of BChE tetramer complexed with PRAD with various sequences have been constructed, in the present study, on the basis of homology modeling and molecular dynamics simulation of explicit water-solvated systems. The 3D models enable us to understand how the BChE subunits are arranged in the tetramer and how the tetramerization domain of BChE is associated with PRAD to form a stable tetramer of human BChE. It has been shown that the six conserved hydrophobic residues located on the C-terminal of BChE are responsible for the key electrostatic and hydrophobic interactions between the tetramerization domain of BChE and PRAD. The simulated tetramer structures suggest that mutation of three residues, i.e., Phe547, Met554, and Phe561, to other hydrophobic residues may be beneficial for increasing the binding between the tetramerization domain of BChE and PRAD. Thus, the detailed structural insights obtained from this study may be valuable for rational design of a recombinant BChE tetramer with a longer residence time in circulation.

Active site gating and substrate specificity of butyrylcholinesterase and acetylcholinesterase: insights from molecular dynamics simulations.

Butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) and acetylcholinesterase (AChE) are highly homologous proteins with distinct substrate preferences. In this study we compared the active sites of monomers and tetramers of human BChE and human AChE after performing molecular dynamics (MD) simulations in water-solvated systems. By comparing the conformational dynamics of gating residues of AChE and BChE, we found that the gating mechanisms of the main door of AChE and BChE are responsible for their different substrate specificities. Our simulation of the tetramers of AChE and BChE indicates that both enzymes could have two dysfunctional active sites due to their restricted accessibility to substrates. The further study on catalytic mechanisms of multiple forms of AChE and BChE would benefit from our comparison of the active sites of the monomers and tetramers of both enzymes.

Molecular basis of the selectivity of the immunoproteasome catalytic subunit LMP2-specific inhibitor revealed by molecular modeling and dynamics simulations.

Given that immunoproteasome inhibitors are currently being developed for a variety of potent therapeutic purposes, the unique specificity of an α',ß'-epoxyketone peptide (UK101) toward the LMP2 subunit of the immunoproteasome (analogous to ß5 subunit of the constitutive proteasome) has been investigated in this study for the first time by employing homology modeling, molecular docking, molecular dynamics simulation, and molecular mechanics Poisson-Boltzmann surface area (MM-PBSA) binding free energy calculations. On the basis of the simulated binding structures, the calculated binding free energies are in qualitative agreement with the corresponding experimental data, and the selectivity of UK101 is explained reasonably. The observed selectivity of UK101 for the LMP2 subunit is rationalized by the requirement for both a linear hydrocarbon chain at the N terminus and a bulky group at the C terminus of the inhibitor, because the LMP2 subunit has a much more favorable hydrophobic pocket interacting with the linear hydrocarbon chain, and the bulky group at the C terminus has a steric clash with the Tyr 169 in ß5 subunit. Finally, our results help to clarify why UK101 is specific to the LMP2 subunit of immunoproteasome, and this investigation should be valuable for rational design of more potent LMP2-specific inhibitors.