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Protein Preparation Automatic Protocol for High-Throughput Inverse Virtual Screening: Accelerating the Target Identification by Computational Methods

Structure-Based Virtual Screening is highly used in the early stages of drug discovery in order to identify new putative lead compounds for a given target. However, when a small molecule elicits a biological effect, but its target is unknown, or the side effects it causes arise from its undesired interaction with unknown counterparts, the identification of its interacting targets represents an indispensable task. The computational procedure named Inverse Virtual Screening, which relies on docking a molecule (or a small set of compounds) against panels of target proteins to select the most promising complexes, could be useful to overcome these issues. Panels can contain thousands of proteins and they must be correctly prepared to assure the best docking performance. Therefore, the preparation of panels of proteins collected in the Protein Data Bank (PDB), if manually performed, may be costly in terms of time and efforts, and this can limit the applicability of this approach in high-throughput virtual screening workflows. We here show an automated workflow to speed up panel preparation and development and, to test its performance, this protocol was initially applied to a panel of 628 viral proteins and, afterwards, to a panel of transferase proteins (2789 entries) to perform a large Inverse Virtual Screening study, testing a small set of compounds synthesized in our laboratory. Tankyrase 2 (PARP 5b) was selected as their preferred target of interaction and the predicted binding was validated by means of surface plasmon resonance (SPR) experiments. This protocol is useful for the rapid identification of the interacting target for a bioactive compound; accordingly, it facilitates the re-evaluation of the pharmacological activity of known active compounds, addressing the repurposing and the polypharmacology concepts.