A receptor dependent-4D QSAR approach to predict the activity of mutated enzymes

Screening and selection tools to obtain focused libraries play a key role in successfully engineering enzymes of desired qualities. The quality of screening depends on efficient assays; however, a focused library generated with a priori information plays a major role in effectively identifying the right enzyme. As a proof of concept, for the first time, receptor dependent – 4D Quantitative Structure Activity Relationship (RD-4D-QSAR) has been implemented to predict kinetic properties of an enzyme. The novelty of this study is that the mutated enzymes also form a part of the training data set. The mutations were modeled in a serine protease and molecular dynamics simulations were conducted to derive enzyme-substrate (E-S) conformations. The E-S conformations were enclosed in a high resolution grid consisting of 156,250 grid points that stores interaction energies to generate QSAR models to predict the enzyme activity. The QSAR predictions showed similar results as reported in the kinetic studies with >80% specificity and >50% sensitivity revealing that the top ranked models unambiguously differentiated enzymes with high and low activity. The interaction energy descriptors of the best QSAR model were used to identify residues responsible for enzymatic activity and substrate specificity.