Kavitha Bharatham

Metabolic Activation of CaMKII by Coenzyme A

Active metabolism regulates oocyte cell death via calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII)-mediated phosphorylation of caspase-2, but the link between metabolic activity and CaMKII is poorly understood. Here we identify coenzyme A (CoA) as the key metabolic signal that inhibits Xenopus laevis oocyte apoptosis by directly activating CaMKII. We found that CoA directly binds to the CaMKII regulatory domain in the absence of Ca(2+) to activate CaMKII in a calmodulin-dependent manner. Furthermore, we show that CoA inhibits apoptosis not only in X. laevis oocytes but also in Murine oocytes. These findings uncover a direct mechanism of CaMKII regulation by metabolism and further highlight the importance of metabolism in preserving oocyte viability.

Discovery of Small Molecules that Inhibit the Disordered Protein, p27 Kip1

Disordered proteins are highly prevalent in biological systems, they control myriad signaling and regulatory processes, and their levels and/or cellular localization are often altered in human disease. In contrast to folded proteins, disordered proteins, due to conformational heterogeneity and dynamics, are not considered viable drug targets. We challenged this paradigm by identifying through NMR-based screening small molecules that bound specifically, albeit weakly, to the disordered cell cycle regulator, p27Kip1 (p27). Two groups of molecules bound to sites created by transient clusters of aromatic residues within p27. Conserved chemical features within these two groups of small molecules exhibited complementarity to their binding sites within p27, establishing structure-activity relationships for small molecule:disordered protein interactions. Finally, one compound counteracted the Cdk2/cyclin A inhibitory function of p27 in vitro, providing proof-of-principle that small molecules can inhibit the function of a disordered protein (p27) through sequestration in a conformation incapable of folding and binding to a natural regulatory target (Cdk2/cyclin A).

Pharmacophore modeling for protein tyrosine phosphatase 1B inhibitors

A three dimensional chemical feature based pharmacophore model was developed for the inhibitors of protein tyrosine phosphatase 1B (PTP1B) using theCATALYST software, which would provide useful knowledge for performing virtual screening to identify new inhibitors targeted toward type II diabetes and obesity. A dataset of 27 inhibitors, with diverse structural properties, and activities ranging from 0.026 to 600 μM, was selected as a training set. Hypo1, the most reliable quantitative four featured pharmacophore hypothesis, was generated from a training set composed of compounds with two H-bond acceptors, one hydrophobic aromatic and one ring aromatic features. It has a correlation coefficient, RMSD and cost difference (null cost-total cost) of 0.946, 0.840 and 65.731, respectively. The best hypothesis (Hypol) was validated using four different methods. Firstly, a cross validation was performed by randomizing the data using theCat- Scramble technique. The results confirmed that the pharmacophore models generated from the training set were valid. Secondly, a test set of 281 molecules was scored, with a correlation of 0.882 obtained between the experimental and predicted activities. Hypol performed well in correctly discriminating the active and inactive molecules. Thirdly, the model was investigated by mapping on two PTP1B inhibitors identified by different pharmaceutical companies. The Hypol model correctly predicted these compounds as being highly active. Finally, docking simulations were performed on few compounds to substantiate the role of the pharmacophore features at the binding site of the protein by analyzing their binding conformations. These multiple validation approaches provided confidence in the utility of this pharmacophore model as a 3D query for virtual screening to retrieve new chemical entities showing potential as potent PTP1B inhibitors.