INVESTIGADORES
DI LELLA Santiago
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Solvent occupancy analysis in ligand structure prediction
Autor/es:
DI LELLA, SANTIAGO; MARTÍ, MARCELO ADRIÁN; ESTRIN, DARÍO ARIEL
Lugar:
Triete, Italia
Reunión:
Workshop; Structure and Dynamics of Hydrogen-Bonded Systems; 2009
Institución organizadora:
International Center for Theoretical Physics
Resumen:
Formation of protein ligand complexes is a fundamental phenomenum in biochemistry. During the process, significant solvent reorganization is produced along the contact surface. Using MD simulations in explicit solvent combined with statistical mechanics analysis, thermodynamic properties of water molecules around proteins can be computed and analyzed in a comparative view. Based on this idea, we developed a set of analisis tools to link slvation with ligand binding in a key carbohydrate binding protein, human galectin1 (hGal1). Speciffically, we defined water sites (WS) in terms of the thermodynamic properties of water molecules strongly bound to protein surfaces. We then succesfully extended the analysis of the role of the surface associated water molecules in the ligand binding and recognition process to many other carbohydrate binding proteins.Our results show that the probability of finding water molecules inside the WS, p(v), with respect to the bulk density is directly correlated to the likeliness of finding an oxhydril group of the ligand in the proteinligand complex. This information can be used to predict possible complex structures when unavailable, and suggest addition of OH containing functional groups to displace water from high p(v) WS to enhance drug, specially glycomimeticdrugs, protein affinity and/or specificity.