CoMFA, CoMSIA, and docking studies on thiolactone-class of potent anti-malarials: identification of essential structural features modulating anti-malarial activity.

The integrated ligand- and structure-based drug design techniques have been applied on a homogeneous dataset of thiolactone-class of potent anti-malarials, to explore the essential structural features for the inhibition of Plasmodium falciparum. Developed CoMFA (q(2) = 0.716) and CoMSIA (q(2) = 0.632) models well explained structure-activity variation in both the training (CoMFA R(2) = 0.948 & CoMSIA R(2) = 0.849) and test set (CoMFA R(2) (pred) = 0.789 & CoMSIA R(2) (pred) = 0.733) compounds. The docking and scoring of the most active compound 10 into the active site of high-resolution (2.35 Å) structure of FabB-TLM binary complex (PDB-ID: 1FJ4) indicated that thiolactone core of this compound forms bifurcated H-bonding with two catalytic residues His298 and His333, and its saturated decyl side group is stabilized by hydrophobic interactions with the residues of a small hydrophobic groove, illustrating that the active site architecture, including two catalytic histidines and a small hydrophobic groove, is vital for protein-ligand interaction. In particular, the length and flexibility of the side group attached to the position 5 of thiolactone have been observed to play a significant role in the interaction with FabB enzyme. These results present scope for rational design of thiolactone-class of compounds that could furnish improved anti-malarial activity.