In recent years, research of the impact of potential chemical endocrine disruptors (KMES) on endocrine function is on the rise. The adverse effects of KMES are also a major public health problem. Scientists and regulatory authorities are working to establish test systems that can quickly and reliably verify that a substance is acting as a hormone disruptor. The main focus of scientific research is on hormonal disruptors of synthetic origin while we have focused on the naturally occurring flavonoids (FL) and isoflavonoids (IFL). The Guidelines for the Prediction of Endocrine Effects of Substances presented by the European Chemicals Commission (ECHA) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in June 2018 recommend the use of software tools to check this activity of the compounds. Among these software tools is the Endocrine Disruptome (ED) program, which predics interactions with endocrine hormonal receptors.
ED allows anchoring of one compound at a time to the active sites of 16 structures belonging to 12 different human nuclear receptors. In our work, we have anchored 43 FL and 40 IFL using the ED program. The results obtained with the ED program were compared with data on potential interactions between compounds and core receptors in the scientific literature. The ED did not always correctly predict the binding of those compounds that have already been bioassayed and for which data are available in the literature. It incorrectly predicted binding for IFL equol, but did not predict binding for 6 IFL and 4 FL. Among the selected Fl and IFL, there are those for which the ED program has predicted a high binding affinity for at least one of the receptors studied, for which the published scientific studies have not yet described these interactions. There are 22 FL and 20 IFL. Among the selected FL and IFL however, there are 5 FL and 7 IFL for which the ED program did not predict binding to any of the selected core receptors.
ED is an example of an easy-to-use method in silico that infers the binding affinity of JHR. The disadvantage of the ED program is that it does not take into account the other interactions that FL and IFL have in the biological system. Unfortunately, due to the lack of data from the scientific literature, we cannot statistically evaluate the predictive power of ED to predict the interactions between selected FL and IFL and selected core receptors.
However, when interpreting the results obtained, one must also be aware that the activity of the compounds, including potential chemical endocrine disruptors, is very complex in vivo, so it is difficult to determine the behavior of the compounds in biological systems by method in silico alone.
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