The interaction of the bioflavonoids with five SARS-CoV-2 proteins targets: An in silico study.

Flavonoids have been shown to have antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-proliferative, antibacterial and antiviral efficacy. Therefore, in this study, we choose 85 flavonoid compounds and screened them to determine their in-silico interaction with protein targets crucial for SARS-CoV-2 infection. The five important targets chosen were the main protease (Mpro), Spike receptor binding domain (Spike-RBD), RNA - dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp or Nsp12), non-structural protein 15 (Nsp15) of SARS-CoV-2 and the host angiotensin converting enzyme-2 (ACE-2) spike-RBD binding domain. The compounds were initially docked at the selected sites and further evaluated for binding free energy, using the molecular mechanics/generalized Born surface area (MMGBSA) method. The three compounds with the best binding scores were subjected to molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The compound, tribuloside, had a high average binding free energy of -86.99 and -88.98 kcal/mol for Mpro and Nsp12, respectively. The compound, legalon, had an average binding free energy of -59.02 kcal/mol at the ACE2 spike-RBD binding site. The compound, isosilybin, had an average free binding energy of -63.06 kcal/mol for the Spike-RBD protein. Overall, our results suggest that tribuloside, legalon and isosilybin should be evaluated in future studies to determine their efficacy to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 infectivity.

Identification of Potential PPAR γ Agonists as Hypoglycemic Agents: Molecular Docking Approach.

Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma (PPAR γ) has become an attractive molecular target for drugs that aim to treat hyperglycemia. The object of our study is to identify the required molecular descriptor and essential amino acid residues for effective PPAR γ agonistic activity. In this work, we employed Molegro Virtual Docker program in all molecular docking simulations. Accuracy of receptor-compound docking was validated on a set of 15 PPAR γ-compound complexes for which crystallographic structures were available. The reliability of the docking results was acceptable with good root-mean-square deviation value (<2 Å). A significant correlation between different data derived from docking calculations and experimental data was revealed. Our results allowed identification of compounds with potential to become drugs against hyperglycemia.