Allosteric Tuning of Caspase-7: Establishing the Nexus of Structure and Catalytic Power.

Invited for the cover of this issue is the group of Michael Ashley Spies at the University of Iowa. The image depicts how mapping allosteric structure-activity relationships reveals the nexus between the active site and the remote allosteric pocket. Read the full text of the article at 10.1002/chem.202300872.

Allosteric Tuning of Caspase-7: Establishing the Nexus of Structure and Catalytic Power.

Caspase-7 (C7), a cysteine protease involved in apoptosis, is a valuable drug target for its role in human diseases (e. g., Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, sepsis). The C7 allosteric site has great potential for small-molecule targeting, but numerous drug discovery efforts have identified precious few allosteric inhibitors. Here we present the first selective, drug-like inhibitor of C7 along with several other improved inhibitors based on our previous fragment hit. We also provide a rational basis for the impact of allosteric binding on the C7 catalytic cycle by using an integrated approach including X-ray crystallography, stopped-flow kinetics, and molecular dynamics simulations. Our findings suggest allosteric binding disrupts C7 pre-acylation by neutralization of the catalytic dyad, displacement of substrate from the oxyanion hole, and altered dynamics of substrate binding loops. This work advances drug targeting efforts and bolsters our understanding of allosteric structure-activity relationships (ASARs).

Enrichment of druggable conformations from apo protein structures using cosolvent-accelerated molecular dynamics.

Here we describe the development of an improved workflow for utilizing experimental and simulated protein conformations in the structure-based design of inhibitors for anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 family proteins. Traditional structure-based approaches on similar targets are often constrained by the sparsity of available structures and difficulties in finding lead compounds that dock against flat, flexible protein-protein interaction surfaces. By employing computational docking of known small molecule inhibitors, we have demonstrated that structural ensembles derived from either accelerated MD (aMD) or MD in the presence of an organic cosolvent generally give better scores than those assessed from analogous conventional MD. Furthermore, conformations obtained from combined cosolvent aMD simulations started with the apo-Bcl-xL structure yielded better average and minimum docking scores for known binders than an ensemble of 72 experimental apo- and ligand-bound Bcl-xL structures. A detailed analysis of the simulated conformations indicates that the aMD effectively enhanced conformational sampling of the flexible helices flanking the main Bcl-xL binding groove, permitting the cosolvent acting as small ligands to penetrate more deeply into the binding pocket and shape ligand-bound conformations not evident in conventional simulations. We believe this approach could be useful for identifying inhibitors against other protein-protein interaction systems involving highly flexible binding sites, particularly for targets with less accumulated structural data.