Chemogenomics: Models of Protein-Ligand Interaction Space

The large majority of the currently used drugs are small molecules that interact with proteins. Understanding protein-ligand recognition is thus central to drug discovery and design. Improved experimental techniques have resulted in an immense growth of drug target information. This has stimulated the development of chemogenomics and proteochemometrics (PCM) that take target information as well as ligand information into account to study the genomic effect of potential drugs. This thesis is concerned with modeling protein-ligand recognition, and the aim is to develop models that generalize to the entire protein-ligand space. To this end, protein-ligand interaction data has been extracted and manually curated from public databases, protein and ligand descriptors have been computed, and predictive models have been induced with machine-learning methods. An introduction to chemogenomics, machine learning, and PCM modeling is given in the thesis summary, which is followed by five research papers. Paper I shows that it is possible to induce interpretable models with a non-linear rule-based method, and paper II demonstrates that local descriptors of protein structure may be used to induce PCM models that cover proteins differing in sequence and fold. In paper III, such local descriptors are used to induce a PCM model on a large dataset that includes all major enzyme classes. This demonstrates that the local descriptors may be used to induce generalized models that span the entire known structural enzyme-ligand space. Paper IV describes a step towards proteome-wide PCM models, and shows that it is possible to predict high- and low-affinity complexes using a set of protein and ligand descriptors that do not require knowledge of 3D structure. Finally, paper V presents a method to visualize and compare protein-ligand chemogenomic subspaces, which may be used to predict unwanted cross-interactions of drugs with other proteins in the proteome

Acknowledgements

Filosofie licentiatavhandling i bioinformatik som framläggs för offentlig gransknin

Interaction Model Based on Local Protein Substructures Generalizes to the Entire Structural Enzyme-Ligand Space

Chemogenomics is a new strategy in in silico drug discovery, where the ultimate goal is to understand molecular recognition for all molecules interacting with all proteins in the proteome. To study such cross interactions, methods that can generalize over proteins that vary greatly in sequence, structure, and function are needed. We present a general quantitative approach to protein−ligand binding affinity prediction that spans the entire structural enzyme-ligand space. The model was trained on a data set composed of all available enzymes cocrystallized with druglike ligands, taken from four publicly available interaction databases, for which a crystal structure is available. Each enzyme was characterized by a set of local descriptors of protein structure that describe the binding site of the cocrystallized ligand. The ligands in the training set were described by traditional QSAR descriptors. To evaluate the model, a comprehensive test set consisting of enzyme structures and ligands was manually curated. The test set contained enzyme-ligand complexes for which no crystal structures were available, and thus the binding modes were unknown. The test set enzymes were therefore characterized by matching their entire structures to the local descriptor library constructed from the training set. Both the training and the test set contained enzyme-ligand complexes from all major enzyme classes, and the enzymes spanned a large range of sequences and folds. The experimental binding affinities (pKi) ranged from 0.5 to 11.9 (0.7−11.0 in the test set). The induced model predicted the binding affinities of the external test set enzyme-ligand complexes with an r2 of 0.53 and an RMSEP of 1.5. This demonstrates that the use of local descriptors makes it possible to create rough predictive models that can generalize over a wide range of protein targets