Bacterial resistance is one of the world’s biggest public health problems and it is getting worse. Improper and inappropriate use of antibiotics has led to the rise of multidrug-resistant bacteria, which cause infections that can no longer be treated with conventional antibacterial treatments. Treatment of such infections is limited, and therefore the development of novel antibacterial agents is necessary. Peptidoglycan being the essential and specific component of the bacterial wall, poses the ideal target for the development of new antimicrobial agents, as by inhibiting its biosynthesis or its specific degradation, selective toxicity is achieved by prokaryotic cell lysis of both, Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria.
As part of our dissertation, we have evaluated the suitability of the bacterial enzyme D-alanine-D-alanine ligase (Ddl), which is an important enzyme in the biosynthetic pathway of peptidoglycan, as the target for new antibacterial agents, using freely available bioinformatics tools and programs. We have analyzed the enzyme in terms of properties that are important when predicting the prospects of suitable targets, such as essentiality, evolutionary conservation, and the ability to form interactions. We have established a list of the most potential enzyme inhibitors known to date, and analyze them, using modern approaches of the pharmaceutical chemistry in order to evaluate their drug-likeness and lead-likeness.
We have found that the Ddl is proven to be essential for 30 organisms. With a combination of evolutionary analysis and formation of interactions, we have identified 11 key amino acids that are more evolutionary conserved than the other sites, are part of an active site where they form most interactions with ligands (ATP and D-alanine-D-alanine dipeptide) and contribute to the highest proportions of interaction formation along the whole enzyme. Amino acid residues that represented the 11 key amino acids: Glu-15, His-63, Glu-68, Lys-97, Lys-144, Ser-151, Glu-187, Glu-270, Asn-272, Gly-276 and Arg-255. We have selected the five most promising enzyme inhibitors that exhibited better physicochemical properties, lipophilicity, pharmacokinetic properties, drug-likeness and other properties related to the pharmaceutical chemistry of inhibitors, than the only current active substance in clinical practice that acts on the enzyme Ddl (cycloserine).
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