Back to the articles list | Back to browse issues page

XML Persian Abstract Print

Evaluation of the efficacy of available plant compounds as SARS-CoV-2 main protease inhibitors
Hamed Shahriarpour1 , Hossein Naderi-Manesh1 , Shahriar Arab * 2, Najmeh Dehghanbanadaki1
1- Department of Biophysics, Faculty of Biological Sciences, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran
2- Department of Biophysics, Faculty of Biological Sciences, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran , sh.arab@modares.ac.ir
Abstract:   (212 Views)
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a global health crisis, and developing effective treatments is essential to prevent the spread of the disease and save millions of lives. One of the key proteins involved in the replication cycle of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is the main protease enzyme, 3CLpro. Due to its high importance, this enzyme is the subject of molecular, structural, and clinical investigations, and efforts have been made to develop drugs that can inhibit its activity. One such drug is the chemical compound N3, which has been found to have a high inhibitory effect against 3CLpro. However, traditional medicine perspectives on this issue have been less explored. In this research, molecular docking interaction simulation and all-atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulation were conducted to study the potential inhibitory capability of generally available 21 plant-extracted compounds against the 3CLpro enzyme. Three compounds with the highest inhibition probability were selected from the molecular docking results and subjected to 100 ns of MD simulation to investigate their stability and structural-dynamic-energetic features. Beside the complexes stability, the results from the simulation demonstrated that, all our selected three compounds induce N3 comparable structural-dynamics characteristics to 3CLpro and, therefore, are expected to have a similar inhibitory ability against this enzyme. Compound number 5 was found to have the most favorable binding energy and was proposed as the best plant substitute for N3. The results from this research can be directly used to design experimental research for 3CLpro enzyme inhibition, saving the time-financial cost.
Keywords: SARS-CoV-2, main protease, inhibitor, molecular docking, molecular dynamics simulation
     
Article Type: Original Research | Subject: Bioinformatics
Received: 2023/04/17 | Accepted: 2024/02/26
Add your comments about this article : Your username or Email:
CAPTCHA
Send email to the article author

Rights and permissions
Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.