Today the identification of lead structures for drug development often starts from small fragment-like molecules raising the chances to find compounds that successfully pass clinical trials. At the ...heart of the screening for fragments binding to a specific target, crystallography delivers structural information essential for subsequent drug design. While it is common to search for bound ligands in electron densities calculated directly after an initial refinement cycle, we raise the important question whether this strategy is viable for fragments characterized by low affinities. Here, we describe and provide a collection of high-quality diffraction data obtained from 364 protein crystals treated with diverse fragments. Subsequent data analysis showed that ∼25% of all hits would have been missed without further refining the resulting structures. To enable fast and reliable hit identification, we have designed an automated refinement pipeline that will inspire the development of optimized tools facilitating the successful application of fragment-based methods.
Display omitted
•Reliable fragment hit identification requires phase improvement through refinement•The modeling of water molecules particularly enhances fragment electron densities•364 diffraction datasets are provided for the design and validation of new methods•An automated procedure was developed to streamline structural refinement
Schiebel et al. describe a large collection of diffraction data obtained from protein crystals treated with 364 different fragment molecules. An automated structural refinement of these datasets suggests that more complete refinement enables detection of additional fragments binding in the target's active site.
Bitopic integral membrane proteins with a single transmembrane helix play diverse roles in catalysis, cell signaling, and morphogenesis. Complete monospanning protein structures are needed to show ...how interaction between the transmembrane helix and catalytic domain might influence association with the membrane and function. We report crystal structures of full-length Saccharomyces cerevisiae lanosterol 14αdemethylase, a membrane monospanning cytochrome P450 of the CYP51 family that catalyzes the first postcyclization step in ergosterol biosynthesis and is inhibited by triazole drugs. The structures reveal a well-ordered N-terminal amphipathic helix preceding a putative transmembrane helix that would constrain the catalytic domain orientation to lie partly in the lipid bilayer. The structures locate the substrate lanosterol, identify putative substrate and product channels, and reveal constrained interactions with triazole antifungal drugs that are important for drug design and understanding drug resistance.
For a little over a decade now, the Macromolecular Crystallography (MX) group at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) has been operating three state-of-the-art synchrotron beamlines for MX at the BESSY ...II storage ring in Berlin. The three HZB-MX beamlines, BL14.1, BL14.2 and BL14.3, serve a stable and growing user community of currently more than 100 independent research groups from Berlin, Germany and Europe. Every year, the beamlines provide close to 200 days of MX-beamtime. Over time, the HZB-MX beamlines and endstations, in particular BL14.1, have been continually developed and upgraded and, since 2010, they operate as the most productive MX beamlines in Germany. The environment of the beamlines includes various ancillary equipment as well as additional facilities, such as office space adjacent to the beamlines, a sample preparation laboratory, a safety level 1 biology laboratory (HZB-MX BioLab) and all necessary computing resources. In this paper, the current status of the beamlines as well as the ongoing developments are described.
In the past two decades, most of the steps in a macromolecular crystallography experiment have undergone tremendous development with respect to speed, feasibility and increase of throughput. The part ...of the experimental workflow that is still a bottleneck, despite significant efforts, involves the manipulation and harvesting of the crystals for the diffraction experiment. Here, a novel low‐cost device is presented that functions as a cover for 96‐well crystallization plates. This device enables access to the individual experiments one at a time by its movable parts, while minimizing evaporation of all other experiments of the plate. In initial tests, drops of many typically used crystallization cocktails could be successfully protected for up to 6 h. Therefore, the manipulation and harvesting of crystals is straightforward for the experimenter, enabling significantly higher throughput. This is useful for many macromolecular crystallography experiments, especially multi‐crystal screening campaigns.
A simple and low‐cost device has been developed to minimize evaporation in microtiter plates for easy crystal handling and harvesting.
Fragment-based lead discovery (FBLD) has become a pillar in drug development. Typical applications of this method comprise at least two biophysical screens as prefilter and a follow-up ...crystallographic experiment on a subset of fragments. Clearly, structural information is pivotal in FBLD, but a key question is whether such a screening cascade strategy will retrieve the majority of fragment-bound structures. We therefore set out to screen 361 fragments for binding to endothiapepsin, a representative of the challenging group of aspartic proteases, employing six screening techniques and crystallography in parallel. Crystallography resulted in the very high number of 71 structures. Yet alarmingly, 44% of these hits were not detected by any biophysical screening approach. Moreover, any screening cascade, building on the results from two or more screening methods, would have failed to predict at least 73% of these hits. We thus conclude that, at least in the present case, the frequently applied biophysical prescreening filters deteriorate the number of possible X-ray hits while only the immediate use of crystallography enables exhaustive retrieval of a maximum of fragment structures, which represent a rich source guiding hit-to-lead-to-drug evolution.
Human ecto-5-nucleotidase (CD73) is involved in purinergic signalling, which influences a diverse range of biological processes. CD73 hydrolyses AMP and is the major control point for the levels of ...extracellular adenosine. Inhibitors of CD73 thus block the immunosuppressive action of adenosine, a promising approach for cancer immunotherapy. Interestingly, ADP and ATP are competitive inhibitors of CD73, with the most potent small-molecule inhibitors to date being non-hydrolysable ADP analogues. While AMP is the major substrate of the enzyme, CD73 has been reported to hydrolyse other 5′-nucleoside monophosphates. Based on a fragment screening campaign at the BESSY II synchrotron, we present the binding modes of various deoxyribo- and ribonucleoside monophosphates and of four additional fragments binding to the nucleoside binding site of the open form of the enzyme. Kinetic analysis of monophosphate hydrolysis shows that ribonucleotide substrates are favoured over their deoxyribose equivalents with AMP being the best substrate. We characterised the initial step of AMP hydrolysis, the binding mode of AMP to the open conformation of CD73 and compared that to other monophosphate substrates. In addition, the inhibitory activity of various bisphosphonic acid derivatives of nucleoside diphosphates was determined. Although AMPCP remains the most potent inhibitor, replacement of the adenine base with other purines or with pyrimidines increases the K
i
value only between twofold and sixfold. On the other hand, these nucleobases offer new opportunities to attach substituents for improved pharmacological properties.
Successful optimization of a given lead scaffold requires thorough binding-site mapping of the target protein particular in regions remote from the catalytic center where high conservation across ...protein families is given. We screened a 361-entry fragment library for binding to the aspartic protease endothiapepsin by crystallography. This enzyme is frequently used as a surrogate for the design of renin and β-secretase inhibitors. A hit rate of 20% was achieved, providing 71 crystal structures. Here, we discuss 45 binding poses of fragments accommodated in pockets remote from the catalytic dyad. Three major hot spots are discovered in remote binding areas: Asp81, Asp119, and Phe291. Compared to the dyad binders, bulkier fragments occupy these regions. Many of the discovered fragments suggest an optimization concept on how to grow them into larger ligands occupying adjacent binding pockets that will possibly endow them with the desired selectivity for one given member of a protein family.
Crystallography is frequently used as follow-up method to validate hits identified by biophysical screening cascades. The capacity of crystallography to directly screen fragment libraries is often ...underestimated, due to its supposed low-throughput and need for high-quality crystals. We applied crystallographic fragment screening to map the protein-binding site of the aspartic protease endothiapepsin by individual soaking experiments. Here, we report on 41 fragments binding to the catalytic dyad and adjacent specificity pockets. The analysis identifies already known warheads but also reveals hydrazide, pyrazole, or carboxylic acid fragments as novel functional groups binding to the dyad. A remarkable swapping of the S1 and S1′ pocket between structurally related fragments is explained by either steric demand, required displacement of a well-bound water molecule, or changes of trigonal-planar to tetrahedral geometry of an oxygen functional group in a side chain. Some warheads simultaneously occupying both S1 and S1′ are promising starting points for fragment-growing strategies.
Crystallographic screening of the binding of small organic compounds (termed fragments) to proteins is increasingly important for medicinal chemistry‐oriented drug discovery. To enable such ...experiments in a widespread manner, an affordable 96‐compound library has been assembled for fragment screening in both academia and industry. The library is selected from already existing protein–ligand structures and is characterized by a broad ligand diversity, including buffer ingredients, carbohydrates, nucleotides, amino acids, peptide‐like fragments and various drug‐like organic compounds. When applied to the model protease endothiapepsin in a crystallographic screening experiment, a hit rate of nearly 10% was obtained. In comparison to other fragment libraries and considering that no pre‐screening was performed, this hit rate is remarkably high. This demonstrates the general suitability of the selected compounds for an initial fragment‐screening campaign. The library composition, experimental considerations and time requirements for a complete crystallographic fragment‐screening campaign are discussed as well as the nine fully refined obtained endothiapepsin–fragment structures. While most of the fragments bind close to the catalytic centre of endothiapepsin in poses that have been observed previously, two fragments address new sites on the protein surface. ITC measurements show that the fragments bind to endothiapepsin with millimolar affinity.
A novel and affordable fragment library was assembled and applied to the model protease endothiapepsin in a crystallographic fragment‐screening experiment.
PDF
