Abstract
HSV infection has high incidence rate and high prevalence. HSV-1 may cause cold sores, fever blisters, and encephalitis. Moreover, HSV-1 has the ability to cause the latent infection of neurons. Therefore, the QSAR studies of HSV-1 inhibitors and drug design based on QSAR have great importance. This paper focused on the pyrazolo[1,5- a]pyridines, which are not acyclic nucleoside analog. The reported pyrazolopyridines showed potent and selective inhibition activity. In order to find novel compounds with higher activity and to develop better predictive models, comparative molecular field analysis (CoMFA), comparative molecular similarity indices analysis (CoMSIA), and hologram quantitative structure activity relationship (HQSAR) methods were performed on a series of HSV-1 inhibitors. The models built by CoMFA, CoMSIA, and HQSAR were found to be suitable for the compounds investigated with good predictive power (CoMFA q2=0.669, R2=0.953; CoMSIA q2=0.693, R2=0.919; HQSAR q2=0.619, R2=0.921). 3D contour maps obtained from PLS models of CoMFA and CoMSIA, and the atom contribution map from PLS model of HQSAR indicated that small steric volumes and electron-withdrawing groups in the R2, R3 regions would be useful to improve the activity. Results showed that the established models of the present work would be helpful in studying the relationship between the bioactivity and the molecular structures and discovering more potent HSV-1inhibitors.
Keywords: CoMFA, CoMSIA, HQSAR, HSV-1inhibitors, Pyrazolopyridines, QSAR
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