Molecular modeling studies to explore the binding affinity of virtually screened inhibitor toward different aminoglycoside kinases from diverse MDR strains.

Antibiotic resistance to aminoglycoside group of antibiotics mainly occurs by aminoglycoside kinases (AKs). Thus, targeting AKs from different multidrug resistant (MDR) strains could result into inhibition of AK enzymes and ultimately the resistance. Therefore, the present study aims to target one of these AKs that is APH(3')-Ia from Acinetobacter baumannii through structure based virtual screening (SBVS) and test the binding affinity of the most stable virtually screened inhibitor with AKs from Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Acinetobacter baumannii, Enterococcus gallinarum, and Escherichia coli. SBVS investigated ZINC71575479 as a most stable inhibitor with -8.92 kcal/mol of binding energy and 0.66 µM of inhibition constant. Molecular docking results revealed that the ZINC71575479 can efficiently bind to nucleotide triphosphate (NTP) binding site of different AKs which is a known drug target site. Sequence analysis study of different AKs showed no significant similarity for active site residues; however structure superimposition study showed conserved NTP-binding domain. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations showed stable behavior of all docked complexes with notable conformational stability of salt bridges at NTP-binding site of different AKs. Binding energy calculations revealed the interactions between key residues from NTP- binding domain of different AKs with ZINC71575479. In order to validate the MD simulations and binding energy results, crystal structure complexed with tyrphostin AG1478 a known inhibitor of AKs was kept as control. Thus, this work demonstrates the binding efficiency of ZINC71575479 toward different AKs for circumventing aminoglycoside resistance and opens avenues for the development of new antibiotics that can target diverse MDR strains with aminoglycoside resistance.