Poster Presentation 14th Australian Peptide Conference 2022

Non-natural amino-acids to astronomic scale (#403)

Leonardo De Maria 1 , Dusan Petrovic 2 , Jens Sadowski 2 , Christian Tyrchan 1 , Kosala Amarasinghe 3 , Leif Eriksson 3
  1. Medicinal Chemistry, Research and Early Development, Respiratory and Immunology , AstraZeneca, Mölndal, Västra Götaland, Sweden
  2. Hit Discovery, Discovery Sciences, AstraZeneca, Mölndal, Västra Götaland, Sweden
  3. Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology, Gothenburg University, Gothenburg, Västra Götaland, Sweden

While current peptide optimization uses a relatively small number of canonical and commercially available non-natural amino acids,  the  chemical  spaces  available  for  small  molecule  drug  discovery  are  in  the  billions  of molecules. In the present study, we describe the development of a large virtual library of readily synthesizable non-natural  amino  acids that  can power  the  virtual  screening protocols and aid in peptide  optimization.  To  that  end,  we  enumerated  nearly  380  thousand  amino  acids  and demonstrated their vast chemical diversity compared to the 20 canonical and commercial residues. Furthermore,  we  selected  a  10  thousand  amino  acid  subset  to  validate  our  virtual  screening workflow  on  the  Keap1–Neh2  complex  model  system.  Through  in  silico  mutations  of  Neh2 peptide residues to those from the virtual library, our docking-based protocol identified a number of possible solutions with a significantly higher predicted affinity towards the Keap1 protein. This protocol demonstrates that the non-natural amino acid chemical space can be massively extended and virtually screened with a reasonable computational cost.