Protein structure-based in-silico approaches to drug discovery: Guide to COVID-19 therapeutics.

With more than 5 million fatalities and close to 300 million reported cases, COVID-19 is the first documented pandemic due to a coronavirus that continues to be a major health challenge. Despite being rapid, uncontrollable, and highly infectious in its spread, it also created incentives for technology development and redefined public health needs and research agendas to fast-track innovations to be translated. Breakthroughs in computational biology peaked during the pandemic with renewed attention to making all cutting-edge technology deliver agents to combat the disease.

Computational modeling and molecular dynamics simulations of mammalian cytoplasmic tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase and its complexes with substrates.

Cytoplasmic tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase (TyrRS) is one of the key enzymes of protein biosynthesis. TyrRSs of pathogenic organisms have gained attention as potential targets for drug development. Identifying structural differences between various TyrRSs will facilitate the development of specific inhibitors for the TyrRSs of pathogenic organisms.

Asymmetric structure and domain binding interfaces of human tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase studied by molecular dynamics simulations.

Human tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase (HsTyrRS) is composed of two structural modules: N-terminal catalytic core and an EMAP II-like C-terminal domain. The structures of these modules are known, but no crystal structure of the full-length HsTyrRS is currently available. An all-atom model of the full-length HsTyrRS was developed in this work.