Nobuhiko Wakai

Mechanism of Deep-Sea Fish α-Actin Pressure Tolerance Investigated by Molecular Dynamics Simulations

The pressure tolerance of monomeric α-actin proteins from the deep-sea fish Coryphaenoides armatus and C. yaquinae was compared to that of non-deep-sea fish C. acrolepis, carp, and rabbit/human/chicken actins using molecular dynamics simulations at 0.1 and 60 MPa. The amino acid sequences of actins are highly conserved across a variety of species. The actins from C. armatus and C. yaquinae have the specific substitutions Q137K/V54A and Q137K/L67P, respectively, relative to C. acrolepis, and are pressure tolerant to depths of at least 6000 m. At high pressure, we observed significant changes in the salt bridge patterns in deep-sea fish actins, and these changes are expected to stabilize ATP binding and subdomain arrangement. Salt bridges between ATP and K137, formed in deep-sea fish actins, are expected to stabilize ATP binding even at high pressure. At high pressure, deep-sea fish actins also formed a greater total number of salt bridges than non-deep-sea fish actins owing to the formation of inter-helix/strand and inter-subdomain salt bridges. Free energy analysis suggests that deep-sea fish actins are stabilized to a greater degree by the conformational energy decrease associated with pressure effect.

Design, synthesis and structure-activity relationship studies of novel sirtuin 2 (SIRT2) inhibitors with a benzamide skeleton.

Human sirtuin 2 (SIRT2) is an attractive target molecule for development of drugs to treat neurodegenerative diseases and cancer, because SIRT2 inhibitors have a protective effect against neurodegeneration and an anti-proliferative effect on cancer stem cells. We designed and synthesized a series of benzamide derivatives as SIRT2 inhibitor candidates. Among them, compound 17k showed the most potent SIRT2-inhibitory activity (IC50=0.60μM), with more than 150-fold selectivity over SIRT1 and SIRT3 isoforms (IC50 >100μM).

Conformational transition pathway and free energy analyses of proteins by parallel cascade selection molecular dynamics (PaCS-MD)

Parallel Cascade Selection Molecular Dynamics (PaCS-MD) was recently proposed to generate conformational transition pathways of proteins under the condition that a certain target quantity to be reached is introduced (R. Harada and A. Kitao, J. Chem. Phys., 139, 035103 2013). In PaCS-MD, the cycle of short multiple independent molecular dynamics simulations and selection of the structures close to the target quantity for the next cycle are repeated until the simulated structures move sufficiently close to the target. Conformational sampling efficiency is demonstrated in the cases of mini-protein folding/unfolding and protein large conformational transitions. The result of PaCS-MD was further utilized to calculate free energy landscape by the combination with weighted-histogram analysis method or Markov state model.