Current Pharmaceutical Design - Volume 15, Issue 35, 2009

How do we communicate with the outside world? How are our senses of vision, smell, taste and pain controlled at the cellular and molecular levels? What causes medical conditions like allergies, hypertension, depression, obesity and various central nervous system disorders? G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) provide a major part of the answer to all of these questions. GPCRs constitute the largest family of cell-surface recept Read More

The role of rhodopsin as a structural prototype for the study of the whole superfamily of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) is reviewed in an historical perspective. Discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, fully sequenced since the early 1980s, and with direct three-dimensional information available since the 1990s, rhodopsin has served as a platform to gather indirect information on the structure of the other su Read More

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are a large superfamily of signaling proteins expressed on the plasma membrane. They are involved in a wide range of physiological processes and, therefore, are exploited as drug targets in a multitude of therapeutic areas. In this extent, knowledge of structural and functional properties of GPCRs may greatly facilitate rational design of modulator compounds. Solution and solid-state nu Read More

G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) are the most targeted group of proteins for the development of therapeutic drugs. Until the last decade, structural information about this family of membrane proteins was relatively scarce, and their mechanisms of ligand binding and signal transduction were modeled on the assumption that GPCRs existed and functioned as monomeric entities. New crystal structures of nativ Read More

This review will focus on the construction, refinement, and validation of G Protein-coupled receptor models for the purpose of structure-based virtual screening. Practical tips and tricks derived from concrete modeling and virtual screening exercises to overcome the problems and pitfalls associated with the different steps of the receptor modeling workflow will be presented. These examples will not only include rhodopsin-l Read More

In silico (or virtual) screening has become a common practice in current computer-aided drug design efforts. However, application to hit discovery in the G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) arena was until recently hampered by the paucity of crystal structures available for this important class of pharmaceutical targets, forcing practitioners in the field to rely on GPCR models derived either ab initio or through homology modelin Read More

The development of ligands for the A3 adenosine receptor (AR) has been directed mainly by traditional medicinal chemistry, but the influence of structure-based approaches is increasing. Rhodopsin-based homology modeling had been used for many years to obtain three-dimensional models of the A3AR, and different A3AR models have been published describing the hypothetical interactions with known A3AR ligands having di Read More