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In Silico Studies Designed to Select Sesquiterpene Lactones with Potential Antichagasic Activity from an In‐House Asteraceae Database
Author(s) -
Acevedo Chonny Herrera,
Scotti Luciana,
Scotti Marcus Tullius
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
chemmedchem
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.817
H-Index - 100
eISSN - 1860-7187
pISSN - 1860-7179
DOI - 10.1002/cmdc.201700743
Subject(s) - trypanosoma cruzi , virtual screening , asteraceae , in silico , chembl , chagas disease , database , computational biology , amastigote , lamiaceae , sesquiterpene , biology , computer science , stereochemistry , chemistry , bioinformatics , drug discovery , botany , genetics , world wide web , leishmania , parasite hosting , gene , immunology
Chagas disease is an endemic disease caused by Trypanosoma cruzi , which affects more than eight million people, mostly in the Americas. A search for new treatments is necessary to control and eliminate this disease. Sesquiterpene lactones (SLs) are an interesting group of secondary metabolites characteristic of the Asteraceae family that have presented a wide range of biological activities. From the ChEMBL database, we selected a diverse set of 4452, 1635, and 1322 structures with tested activity against the three T. cruzi parasitic forms: amastigote, trypomastigote, and epimastigote, respectively, to create random forest (RF) models with an accuracy of greater than 74 % for cross‐validation and test sets. Afterward, a ligand‐based virtual screen of the entire SLs of the Asteraceae database stored in SistematX (1306 structures) was performed. In addition, a structure‐based virtual screen was also performed for the same set of SLs using molecular docking. Finally, using an approach combining ligand‐based and structure‐based virtual screening along with the equations proposed in this study to normalize the probability scores, we verified potentially active compounds and established a possible mechanism of action.