Advances in GPCR modeling evaluated by the GPCR Dock 2013 assessment: Meeting new challenges

© 2014 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved. Despite tremendous successes of GPCR crystallography, the receptors with available structures represent only a small fraction of human GPCRs. An important role of the modeling community is to maximize structural insights for the remaining receptors and complexes. The community-wide GPCR Dock assessment was established to stimulate and monitor the progress in molecular modeling and ligand docking for GPCRs. The four targets in the present third assessment round presented new and diverse challenges for modelers, including prediction of allosteric ligand interaction and activation states in 5-hydroxytryptamine receptors 1B and 2B, and modeling by extremely distant homology for smoothened receptor. Forty-four modeling groups participated in the assessment. State-of-the-art modeling approaches achieved close-to-experimental accuracy for small rigid orthosteric ligands and models built by close homology, and they correctly predicted protein fold for distant homology targets. Predictions of long loops and GPCR activation states remain unsolved problems

Modeling of ligand binding to dopamine D2 receptor

The dopaminic receptors have been for long time the major targets for developing new small molecules with high affinity and selectivity to treat psychiatric disorders, neurodegeneration, drug abuse, and other therapeutic areas. In the absence of a 3D structure for the human D2 dopamine (HDD2) receptor, the efforts for discovery and design of new potential drugs rely on comparative models generation, docking and pharmacophore development studies. To get a better understanding of the HDD2 receptor binding site and the ligand-receptor interactions a homology model of HDD2 receptor based on the X-ray structure of β2-adrenergic receptor has been built and used to dock a set of partial agonists of HDD2 receptor. The main characteristics of the binding mode for the HDD2 partial agonists set are given by the ligand particular folding and a complex network of contacts represented by stacking interactions, salt bridge and hydrogen bond formation. The characterization of the partial agonist binding mode at HDD2 receptor provide the needed information to generate pharmacophore models which represent essential information in the future virtual screening studies in order to identify new potential HDD2 partial agonists

A crowdsourcing evaluation of the NIH chemical probes

Between 2004 and 2008, the NIH molecular libraries and imaging initiative (MLI) pilot phase funded ten high-throughput Screening Centers, resulting in the deposition of 691 assays into PubChem and the nomination of 64 chemical probes. We crowdsourced the MLI output to 11 experts, who expressed medium or high levels of confidence in 48 of these 64 probes