In silico Screening for Identification of Novel Anti-malarial Inhibitors by Molecular Docking, Pharmacophore Modeling and Virtual Screening

Title:In silico Screening for Identification of Novel Anti-malarial Inhibitors by Molecular Docking, Pharmacophore Modeling and Virtual Screening

Volume: 11 Issue: 7

Author(s): Sidra Batool, Zeshan Aslam Khan, Warda Kamal, Gohar Mushtaq and Mohammad Amjad Kamal

Affiliation:

Keywords: Drug design, virtual screening, cheminformatics, docking, pharmacophore modeling, Plasmodium falciparum, antimalarials, princeton database.

Abstract: Objective: Drug resistance from affordable drugs has increased the number of deaths from malaria globally. This problem has raised the requirement to design new drugs against multidrugresistant Plasmodium falciparum parasite. Methods: In the current project, we have focused on four important proteins of Plasmodium falciparum and used them as receptors against a dataset of four anti-malarial drugs. In silico analysis of these receptors and ligand dataset was carried out using Autodock 4.2. A pharmacophore model was also established using Ligandscout. Results: Analysis of docking experiments showed that all ligands bind efficiently to four proteins of Plasmodium falciparum. We have used ligand-based pharmacophore modeling and developed a pharmacophore model that has three hydrophobic regions, two aromatic rings, one hydrogen acceptor and one hydrogen donor. Using this pharmacophore model, we have screened a library of 50,000 compounds. The compounds that shared features of our pharmacophore model and exhibited interactions with the four proteins of our receptors dataset are short-listed. Conclusion: As there is a need of more anti-malarial drugs, therefore, this research will be helpful in identifying novel anti-malarial drugs that exhibited bindings with four important proteins of Plasmodium falciparum. The hits obtained in this study can be considered as useful leads in anti-malarial drug discovery.

Cite this article as:

Batool Sidra, Khan Aslam Zeshan, Kamal Warda, Mushtaq Gohar and Kamal Amjad Mohammad, In silico Screening for Identification of Novel Anti-malarial Inhibitors by Molecular Docking, Pharmacophore Modeling and Virtual Screening, Medicinal Chemistry 2015; 11 (7) . https://dx.doi.org/10.2174/1573406411666150305113533