MELD-Bracket Ranks Binding Affinities of Diverse Sets of Ligands.

Journal of chemical information and modeling
Authors
Abstract

Affinity ranking of structurally diverse small-molecule ligands is a challenging problem with important applications in structure-based drug discovery. Absolute binding free energy methods can model diverse ligands, but the high computational cost of the current methods limits application to data sets with few ligands. We recently developed MELD-Bracket, a Molecular Dynamics method for efficient affinity ranking of ligands [ 2022, 18 (1), 374-379]. It utilizes a Bayesian framework to guide sampling to relevant regions of phase space, and it couples this with a bracket-like competition on a pool of ligands. Here we find that 6-competitor MELD-Bracket can rank dozens of diverse ligands that have low structural similarity and different net charges. We benchmark it on four protein systems─PTB1B, Tyk2, BACE, and JAK3─having varied modes of interactions. We also validated 8-competitor and 12-competitor protocols. The MELD-Bracket protocols presented here may have the appropriate balance of accuracy and computational efficiency to be suitable for ranking diverse ligands from typical drug discovery campaigns.

Year of Publication
2023
Journal
Journal of chemical information and modeling
Volume
63
Issue
9
Pages
2857-2865
Date Published
05/2023
ISSN
1549-960X
DOI
10.1021/acs.jcim.3c00243
PubMed ID
37093848
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