An acido- and photochromic molecular device that mimics triode action

© The Royal Society of Chemistry 2016. The photo-controlled shift of pH titration curves, describing the acidochromic behaviour of a spiropyran switch network, was harnessed for the realisation of a molecular triode. The intricate network can be correctly interpreted with respect to the pH dependence of the main involved species

The crystal structure of asparaginyl-tRNA synthetase from Thermus thermophilus and its complexes with ATP and asparaginyl-adenylate: the mechanism of discrimination between asparagine and aspartic acid.

The crystal structure of Thermus thermophilus asparaginyl-tRNA synthetase has been solved by multiple isomorphous replacement and refined at 2.6 A resolution. This is the last of the three class IIb aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase structures to be determined. As expected from primary sequence comparisons, there are remarkable similarities between the tertiary structures of asparaginyl-tRNA synthetase and aspartyl-tRNA synthetase, and most of the active site residues are identical except for three key differences. The structure at 2.65 A of asparaginyl-tRNA synthetase complexed with a non-hydrolysable analogue of asparaginyl-adenylate permits a detailed explanation of how these three differences allow each enzyme to discriminate between their respective and very similar amino acid substrates, asparagine and aspartic acid. In addition, a structure of the complex of asparaginyl-tRNA synthetase with ATP shows exactly the same configuration of three divalent cations as previously observed in the seryl-tRNA synthetase-ATP complex, showing that this a general feature of class II synthetases. The structural similarity of asparaginyl- and aspartyl-tRNA synthetases as well as that of both enzymes to the ammonia-dependent asparagine synthetase suggests that these three enzymes have evolved relatively recently from a common ancestor

Chromo-pharmacophores: photochromic diarylmaleimide inhibitors for sirtuins

Controlling the activity of sirtuins is of high biomedical relevance as the enzymes are involved in cancer, neurodegeneration and other diseases. Therefore structural elements of 3,4-bisindoylmaleimides (BIMs), which are known NAD+-dependent histone deacetylase (sirtuin) inhibitors, were merged with photochromic diarylmaleimides to yield photoswitchable enzyme inhibitors. The new inhibitors show excellent photophysical properties, are switchable even in polar solvents, and subtype selective against hSirt2. The inhibitory activity changes up to a factor of 22 for the two photoisomers and physiological properties can therefore be effectively toggled by irradiation with light of different wavelengths. Docking experiments using the enzyme crystal structure explain the observed activity changes based on the steric demand of the thiophene substitution and the rigidity of the molecular structure

Discovering new classes of Brugia malayi asparaginyl-tRNA synthetase inhibitors and relating specificity to conformational change

The original publication can be found at www.springerlink.comSLIDE software, which models the flexibility of protein and ligand side chains while docking, was used to screen several large databases to identify inhibitors of Brugia malayi asparaginyl-tRNA synthetase (AsnRS), a target for anti-parasitic drug design. Seven classes of compounds identified by SLIDE were confirmed as micromolar inhibitors of the enzyme. Analogs of one of these classes of inhibitors, the long side-chain variolins, cannot bind to the adenosyl pocket of the closed conformation of AsnRS due to steric clashes, though the short side-chain variolins identified by SLIDE apparently bind isosterically with adenosine. We hypothesized that an open conformation of the motif 2 loop also permits the long side-chain variolins to bind in the adenosine pocket and that their selectivity for Brugia relative to human AsnRS can be explained by differences in the sequence and conformation of this loop. Loop flexibility sampling using Rigidity Optimized Conformational Kinetics (ROCK) confirms this possibility, while scoring of the relative affinities of the different ligands by SLIDE correlates well with the compounds' ranks in inhibition assays. Combining ROCK and SLIDE provides a promising approach for exploiting conformational flexibility in structure-based screening and design of species selective inhibitors.Sai Chetan K. Sukuru, Thibaut Crepin, Youli Milev, Liesl C. Marsh, Jonathan B. Hill, Regan J. Anderson, Jonathan C. Morris, Anjali Rohatgi, Gavin O’Mahony, Morten Grøtli, Franck Danel, Malcolm G. P. Page, Michael Härtlein, Stephen Cusack, Michael A. Kron, Leslie A. Kuh