Unlabelled: New and improved drugs are required for the treatment and ultimate eradication of malaria. The efficacy of front-line therapies is now threatened by emerging drug resistance; thus, new tools to support the development of drugs with a lower propensity for resistance are needed. Here, we describe the development of a RESistance Mapping And Profiling (ResMAP) platform for the identification of resistance-conferring mutations in drug targets.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProtein evolution is constrained by structure and function, creating patterns in residue conservation that are routinely exploited to predict structure and other features. Similar constraints should affect variation across individuals, but it is only with the growth of human population sequencing that this has been tested at scale. Now, human population constraint has established applications in pathogenicity prediction, but it has not yet been explored for structural inference.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFragment screening is used to identify binding sites and leads in drug discovery, but it is often unclear which binding sites are functionally important. Here, data from 37 experiments, and 1309 protein structures binding to 1601 ligands were analysed. A method to group ligands by binding sites is introduced and sites clustered according to profiles of relative solvent accessibility.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSARS-CoV-2 Spike (Spike) binds to human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) and the strength of this interaction could influence parameters relating to virulence. To explore whether population variants in ACE2 influence Spike binding and hence infection, we selected 10 ACE2 variants based on affinity predictions and prevalence in gnomAD and measured their affinities and kinetics for Spike receptor binding domain through surface plasmon resonance (SPR) at 37°C. We discovered variants that reduce and enhance binding, including three ACE2 variants that strongly inhibited (p.
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