6pu8

Publication Abstract from PubMed

HIV-1 protease is indispensable for virus propagation and an important therapeutic target for antiviral inhibitors to treat AIDS. As such inhibitors are transition-state mimics, a detailed understanding of the enzyme mechanism is crucial for the development of better anti-HIV drugs. Here, we used room-temperature joint X-ray/neutron crystallography to directly visualize hydrogen atoms and map hydrogen bonding interactions in a protease complex with peptidomimetic inhibitor KVS-1 containing a reactive nonhydrolyzable ketomethylene isostere, which, upon reacting with the catalytic water molecule, is converted into a tetrahedral intermediate state, KVS-1TI. We unambiguously determined that the resulting tetrahedral intermediate is an oxyanion, rather than the gem-diol, and both catalytic aspartic acid residues are protonated. The oxyanion tetrahedral intermediate appears to be unstable, even though the negative charge on the oxyanion is delocalized through a strong n --> pi* hyperconjugative interaction into the nearby peptidic carbonyl group of the inhibitor. To better understand the influence of the ketomethylene isostere as a protease inhibitor, we have also examined the protease structure and binding affinity with keto-darunavir (keto-DRV), which similar to KVS-1 includes the ketomethylene isostere. We show that keto-DRV is a significantly less potent protease inhibitor than DRV. These findings shed light on the reaction mechanism of peptide hydrolysis catalyzed by HIV-1 protease and provide valuable insights into further improvements in the design of protease inhibitors.

Visualizing Tetrahedral Oxyanion Bound in HIV-1 Protease Using Neutrons: Implications for the Catalytic Mechanism and Drug Design.,Kumar M, Mandal K, Blakeley MP, Wymore T, Kent SBH, Louis JM, Das A, Kovalevsky A ACS Omega. 2020 May 14;5(20):11605-11617. doi: 10.1021/acsomega.0c00835., eCollection 2020 May 26. PMID:32478251^[1]

From MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.