Assessing Protein-Ligand Binding Modes With Computational Tools: the Case of Pde4b

Abstract

In a first step in the discovery of novel potent inhibitor structures for the PDE4B family with limited side effects we present a protocol to rank newly designed molecules through the estimation of their IC values. Our protocol is based on reproducing the linear relationship between the logarithm of experimental IC values [(IC)] and their calculated binding free energies (). From 13 known PDE4B inhibitors we show here that (1) binding free energies obtained after a docking process by AutoDock are not accurate enough to reproduce this linear relationship(2) MM-GB/SA post-processing of molecular dynamics (MD) trajectories of the top ranked AutoDock pose improves the linear relationship(3) by taking into account all representative structures obtained by AutoDock and by averaging MM-GB/SA computations on a series of 40 independent MD trajectories a linear relationship between (IC) and the lowest is achieved with R-2 = 0.944 .