Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 17, Issue 21, 2017

The eternal or ultimate goal of medicinal chemistry is to find most effective ways to treat various diseases and extend human beings’ life as long as possible. Human being is a biological entity. To realize such an ultimate goal, the inputs or breakthroughs from the advances in biological science are no doubt most important that may even drive medicinal science into a revolution. In this review article, we are to address this from Read More

As a subset of glycosyltransferases, the family of sialyltransferases catalyze transfer of sialic acid (Sia) residues to terminal non-reducing positions on oligosaccharide chains of glycoproteins and glycolipids, utilizing CMP-Neu5Ac as the activated sugar nucleotide donor. In the four known sialyltransferase families (ST3Gal, ST6Gal, ST6GalNAc and ST8Sia), the ST8Sia family catalyzes synthesis of α2, 8-linked sialic/polysialic a Read More

G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) are the most common therapeutic targets for drug discovery by the pharmaceutical industries. Since 2007, several three-dimensional X-ray crystallographic structures of ligand-activated GPCRs have been determined in their agonist-bound or inverse agonist-bound states, providing a wealth of fundamental resources for the investigation of the atomic-level mechanism of receptor activ Read More

Post translational modification (PTM) is one of the critical levels in regulation of gene expression that determines the fate of proteins after translation in eukaryotic cells. Since the detection of PTM sites in proteins is useful for diagnosis and prevention of diseases, numerous web-tool predictors are introduced to predict various types of PTMs. In this paper, an attempt is made to summarize a number of server predicto Read More

BRI1 and BAK1 are Receptor-Like Kinases (RLKs), one of the largest gene families in plants participating in various cell signal transduction from cell surface to cytoplasm with oligomerization and phosphorylation to regulate plant growth, development, immunity, and environmental responses. Based on the recent investigations on the BRI1 and BAK1 and other RLKs involving in the receptor complex formation, transphosphoryla Read More

Enzymes are biological catalysts that play an important role in determining the patterns of chemical transformations pertaining to life. Many milestones have been achieved in unraveling the mechanisms in which the enzymes orchestrate various cellular processes using experimental and computational approaches. Experimental studies generating nearly all possible mutations of target enzymes have been aided by rapid c Read More

The last couple of decades has witnessed that an amalgamation of multidisciplinary branches of science come together in the form of ‘Bioinformatics’ and made a substantial impact on the drug designing process. The applicability of Bioinformatics approaches has been able to lower down the overall cost and time of drug discovery and development. The Computer Aided Drug Designing System (CADDS) using e Read More

(2R,3R)-2,3-Butanediol has many industrial applications, such as it is used as an antifreeze agent and low freezing point fuel. In addition, it is particularly important to provide chiral groups in drugs. In recent years, this valuable bio-based chemical has attracted increasing attention, and significant progress has been made in the development of microbial cell factories for (2R,3R)-2,3-butanediol production. This article revi Read More

Addiction is a chronic, relapsing disease of the brain that includes drug-induced compulsive seeking behavior and consumption of drugs. Dopamine (DA) is considered to be critical in drug addiction due to reward mechanisms in the midbrain. In this article, we review the major animal models in addictive drug experiments in vivo and in vitro. We discuss the relevance of the structure and pharmacological function of DA receptors. Read More

System-level understanding of the relationships between drugs and targets is very important for enhancing drug research, especially for drug function repositioning. The experimental methods used to determine drug-target interactions are usually time-consuming, tedious and expensive, and sometimes lack reproducibility. Thus, it is highly desired to develop computational methods for efficiently and effectively analyzing a Read More