Biology subjects

Borrelli, K.

Publications and source records attributed to Borrelli, K..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2021

Plasticity in Ligand Recognition at Somatostatin Receptors

Somatostatin is a signaling peptide that plays a pivotal and wide-ranging role in physiologic processes relating to metabolism and growth through its actions at somatostatin receptors (SSTRs). Members of the somatostatin receptor subfamily, particularly SSTR2, are key drug targets for neuroendocrine neoplasms, with several synthetic peptide agonists currently in clinical use. Here, we show the cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) structures of active-state SSTR2 in complex with heterotrimeric Gi protein and either the endogenous ligand SST14 or the FDA-approved drug octreotide. Complemented by biochemical assays and molecular dynamics simulations, these structures reveal key details of ligand recognition, receptor activation, and subtype-selectivity at somatostatin receptors. We find that SSTR ligand recognition is highly diverse, as demonstrated by ligand-induced conformational changes in ECL2, substantial sequence divergence across subtypes in extracellular regions, and loss of ligand binding upon several structurally homologous substitutions between subtypes. Despite this complexity, we rationalize several previously described sources of SSTR subtype selectivity and identify an additional key interaction for SSTR2/3/5 specific binding. These results shed light on the basis of ligand recognition by somatostatin receptors and provide valuable insights for structure-based drug discovery at these targets.

biophysics↗

bioRxiv2019

GemSpot: A Pipeline for Robust Modeling of Ligands into CryoEM Maps

Producing an accurate atomic model of biomolecule-ligand interactions from maps generated by cryo-electron microscopy often presents challenges inherent to the methodology and the dynamic nature of ligand binding. Here we have developed GemSpot, a pipeline of computational chemistry methods that take into account EM map potentials, quantum mechanics energy calculations, and water molecule site prediction to generate candidate poses and provide a measure of the degree of confidence. The pipeline is validated through several published cryoEM structures of complexes in different resolution ranges and various types of ligands. In all cases, at least one identified pose produced both excellent interactions with the target and agreement with the map. GemSpot will be valuable for the robust identification of ligand poses and drug discovery efforts through cryoEM.

biophysics↗

bioRxiv2018

qFit-ligand reveals widespread conformational heterogeneity of drug-like molecules in X-ray electron density maps

Proteins and ligands sample a conformational ensemble that governs molecular recognition, activity, and dissociation. In structure-based drug design, access to this conformational ensemble is critical to understand the balance between entropy and enthalpy in lead optimization. However, ligand conformational heterogeneity is currently severely underreported in crystal structures in the Protein Data Bank, owing in part to a lack of automated and unbiased procedures to model an ensemble of protein-ligand states into X-ray data. Here, we designed a computational method, qFit-ligand, to automatically resolve conformationally averaged ligand heterogeneity in crystal structures, and applied it to a large set of protein receptor-ligand complexes. We found that up to 29 % of a dataset of protein crystal structures bound with drug-like molecules present evidence of unmodeled, averaged, relatively isoenergetic conformations in ligand-receptor interactions. In many retrospective cases, these alternate conformations were adventitiously exploited to guide compound design, resulting in improved potency or selectivity. Combining qFit-ligand with high-throughput screening or multi-temperature crystallography could therefore augment the structure-based drug design toolbox.

biophysics↗