Crystallographic and electrophilic fragment screening of the SARS-CoV-2 main protease
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Abstract
COVID-19, caused by SARS-CoV-2, lacks effective therapeutics. Additionally, no antiviral drugs or vaccines were developed against the closely related coronavirus, SARS-CoV-1 or MERS-CoV, despite previous zoonotic outbreaks. To identify starting points for such therapeutics, we performed a large-scale screen of electrophile and non-covalent fragments through a combined mass spectrometry and X-ray approach against the SARS-CoV-2 main protease, one of two cysteine viral proteases essential for viral replication. Our crystallographic screen identified 71 hits that span the entire active site, as well as 3 hits at the dimer interface. These structures reveal routes to rapidly develop more potent inhibitors through merging of covalent and non-covalent fragment hits; one series of low-reactivity, tractable covalent fragments were progressed to discover improved binders. These combined hits offer unprecedented structural and reactivity information for on-going structure-based drug design against SARS-CoV-2 main protease.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.27.118117: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources 2020); heterocyclic electrophiles (Keeley et al., 2019); and the SpotFinder library (Bajusz and Keserü). SpotFindersuggested: (Spotfinder, RRID:SCR_000085)Further analysis was performed with XChemExplorer (Krojer et al., 2017): electron density maps were generated with Dimple (Keegan et al., 2015); ligand-binding events were identified using PanDDA (Pearce et al., 2017) (both the released version 0.2 and the pre-release development version (https://github.com/ConorFWild/pandda)); … SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.27.118117: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources 2020); heterocyclic electrophiles (Keeley et al., 2019); and the SpotFinder library (Bajusz and Keserü). SpotFindersuggested: (Spotfinder, RRID:SCR_000085)Further analysis was performed with XChemExplorer (Krojer et al., 2017): electron density maps were generated with Dimple (Keegan et al., 2015); ligand-binding events were identified using PanDDA (Pearce et al., 2017) (both the released version 0.2 and the pre-release development version (https://github.com/ConorFWild/pandda)); ligands were modelled into PanDDA-calculated event maps using Coot (Emsley et al., 2010); restraints were calculated with ACEDRG or GRADE (Long et al., 2017, Smart et al., 2010); and structures were refined with Refmac (Murshudov et al., 2011) and Buster (Bricogne et al., 2017). Cootsuggested: (Coot, RRID:SCR_014222)Refmacsuggested: (Refmac, RRID:SCR_014225)Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: We found the following clinical trial numbers in your paper:
Identifier Status Title NCT04353128 Recruiting Efficacy of Melatonin in the Prophylaxis of Coronavirus Dise… Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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