Current Computer - Aided Drug Design - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2015

Nerve impulses travel along myelinated axons as much as 300-fold faster than they do along unmyelinated axons. Myelination is essential for normal nervous system behavior in vertebrates as illustrated by leukodystrophies, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or multiple sclerosis (MS), where myelin is degenerated or damaged. The increased conduction velocity that occurs in myelinated axons is dependent on gap Read More

Candida albicans is one of the most important causes of life-threating fungal infections. Lanosterol 14α-demethylase (Cytochrome P450DM) is the target enzyme of azole antifungal agents. The study involved selection and modeling of the target enzyme followed by refinement of the model using molecular dynamic simulation. The modeled structure of enzyme was validated using Ramachandran plot and Sequence determin Read More

In view of the serious health problems concerning infectious diseases in heavily populated areas, we followed the strategy of lead compound diversification to evaluate the near-by chemical space for new organic compounds. To this end, twenty derivatives of nitazoxanide (NTZ) were synthesized and tested for activity against Entamoeba histolytica parasites. To ensure drug-likeliness and activity relatedness of the new Read More

The protein structure prediction is of three categories: homology modeling, fold recognition and ab initio modeling, and this division into categories depends on whether similar protein structures were previously determined using X-ray crystallography or NMR or not. Protein structure models predicted by the free modeling (ab initio modeling) are considered as low-resolution models. Progress has recently been made in refinin Read More

The search for newer cytotoxic agents has taken many paths in the recent years and in fact some of these efforts led to the discovery of some potent cytotoxic agents. Though the vast number of targets of tumor progression has been identified recently, kinases remained key targets in drug design. It is well established that inhibition of JNK1, a serine/threonine protein kinase delays tumor formation. Poly hydroxylated chr Read More

Pharmacophore models of G protein-coupled receptor40 (GPR40) agonists were developed using Discovery Studio V2.1. One hydrogen bond acceptor and three hydrophobic features, Hypo 1 which was the best hypothesis, had a correlation co-efficient of 0.971, cost difference of 73.041, and RMSD 0.680. This model was validated by test set, Fischer randomization test and decoy set. Subsequently, Hypo 1 was employed a Read More

Diabetes accounts for high mortality rate worldwide affecting million of lives annually. Global prevalence of diabetes and its rising frequency makes it a key area of research in drug discovery programs. The research article describes the development of quantitative structure activity relationship model against PPARγ, a promising drug target for diabetes. Multiple linear regression approach was adopted for statistical model develo Read More

Induction of apoptosis by the activation of caspase 3 makes it a promising target for designing anticancer drugs hence an investigation for the essential structural features mandatory for caspase 3 activation has been carried out using a dataset comprising of caspase 3 activator candidate drug Azixa in phase II clinical trial and its analogs using DS2.0. A training set of 40 compounds was selected for the purpose of model ge Read More

Dengue virus (DENV) is the member of Flaviviridae and causative agent of Dengue Haemorrhagic Fever and Dengue Shock Syndrome. Every year, around 70% of the world population is at risk, due to epidemic episodes orchestrated by one or more of its serotypes. So, a tetravalent DENV vaccine is needed which may induce the immune response against all four DENV serotypes. In this study, B-cell and T-cell epitopes have Read More