BMaps: A Web Application for Fragment-Based Drug Design and Compound Binding Evaluation.

Fragment-based drug design uses data about where, and how strongly, small chemical fragments bind to proteins, to assemble new drug molecules. Over the past decade, we have been successfully using fragment data, derived from thermodynamically rigorous Monte Carlo fragment-protein binding simulations, in dozens of preclinical drug programs. However, this approach has not been available to the broader research community because of the cost and complexity of doing simulations and using design tools.

Fast estimation of solvation free energies for diverse chemical species.

The free energy of solvation can play an important or even dominant role in the accurate prediction of binding affinities and various other molecular-scale interaction phenomena critical to the study of biochemical processes. Many research applications for solvation modeling, such as fragment-based drug design, require algorithms that are both accurate and computationally inexpensive. We have developed a calculation of solvation free energy which runs fast enough for interactive applications, functions for a wide range of chemical species relevant to simulating molecules for biological and pharmaceutical applications, and is readily extended when data for new species becomes available.

A fragment-based approach to the SAMPL3 Challenge.

The success of molecular fragment-based design depends critically on the ability to make predictions of binding poses and of affinity ranking for compounds assembled by linking fragments. The SAMPL3 Challenge provides a unique opportunity to evaluate the performance of a state-of-the-art fragment-based design methodology with respect to these requirements. In this article, we present results derived from linking fragments to predict affinity and pose in the SAMPL3 Challenge.

N-Acetyltransferase and sulfotransferase activity in human prostate: potential for carcinogen activation.

Background: N-Acetyltransferases (NATs) and sulfotransferases (SULTs) are key phase II metabolizing enzymes that can be involved both in the detoxification and in the activation of many human promutagens and procarcinogens.

Methods And Results: We investigated the expression of NATs and SULTs in human prostate and tested their role in the activation the N-hydroxy (N-OH) metabolite of 2-amino-3-methylimidazo[4,5-f]quinoline (IQ), a dietary carcinogen, to form DNA adducts. Western blotting showed detectable levels of NAT1, SULT1A1 and SULT1A3 with marked inter-individual variation.