In this study, for the first time, it was demonstrated that trans-anethole has the potential to disrupt bacterial communication and can be developed as a novel QSI to combat with P. aeruginosa and other clinically significant pathogens.

In this study density functional theory (DFT) has been used to model the elementary steps and rationalize the free radical polymerization kinetics in allyl methacrylate (AMA), allyl 2‐cyanoacrylate (ACA) and methyl α‐[(allyloxy)methyl]acrylate. The models used in this study have revealed the fact that while methyl α‐[(allyloxy)methyl]acrylate, cyclopolymerizes via 5‐membered rings, AMA and ACA do not. The cyclization tendency of methyl α‐[(allyloxy)methyl]acrylate is attributed to the similar hybridization (sp3) of C3 and C5 favoring a quasi cyclic structure for the reactive rotamer. On the other hand, the presence of the cyano (CN) group in ACA facilitates the initiation step as compared to AMA. The chain transfer reaction does not seem to play a major role in the monomers of interest. This study highlights the usage of quantum chemistry in determining the cyclization tendencies of allyl acrylate derivatives in their free radical polymerization reactions. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part A: Polym Chem, 2011

In this study, pharmacophore modelling was carried out for novel PhosphodiesteraseIV (PDEIV) inhibitors. A pharmacophore-based virtual screening, which resulted in 1959 hit compounds was performed with six chemical databases. The pharmacophore screening was proven to be successful in discriminating active and inactive inhibitors using a set of compounds with known activity obtained from ChEMBL database. Furthermore, the Lipinski's rule of five was applied for physicochemical filtering of the hit molecules and this yielded 1840 compounds. Three docking software tools, AutoDock 4.0, AutoDock Vina, and Gold v5.1 were used for the docking process. All 1840 compounds and the known selective inhibitor, rolipram, were docked into the active site of the target protein. A total of 234 compounds with all three scoring values higher than those of rolipram were determined with the three docking tools. The interaction maps of 14 potent inhibitors complexed with PDEIV B and D isoforms have been analyzed and seven key residues (Asn 395, Gln 443, Tyr 233, Ile 410, Phe 446, Asp 392, Thr 407) were found to interact with more than 80 % of the potent inhibitors. For each one of the 234 hit compounds, using the bound conformation with the highest AutoDock score, the interacting residues were determined. 117 out of 234 compounds are found to interact with at least five of the seven key residues and these were selected for further evaluation. The conformation with the highest AutoDock score for each 117 compounds were rescored using the DSX scoring function. This yielded a total of 101 compounds with better score values than the natural ligand rolipram. For ADME/TOX calculations, the FAF-Drugs2 server was used and 32 out of 101 compounds were found to be non-toxic.

Human Topoisomerase IB (hTopoIB) enzyme is monomeric protein that relaxes the supercoils on double-stranded DNA by forming a covalent DNA/hTopoIB complex by introducing a nick on the DNA strand. Inhibition...

In a first step in the discovery of novel potent inhibitor structures for the PDE4B family with limited side effects, we present a protocol to rank newly designed molecules through the estimation of their IC[Formula: see text] values. Our protocol is based on reproducing the linear relationship between the logarithm of experimental IC[Formula: see text] values [[Formula: see text](IC[Formula: see text])] and their calculated binding free energies ([Formula: see text]). From 13 known PDE4B inhibitors, we show here that (1) binding free energies obtained after a docking process by AutoDock are not accurate enough to reproduce this linear relationship; (2) MM-GB/SA post-processing of molecular dynamics (MD) trajectories of the top ranked AutoDock pose improves the linear relationship; (3) by taking into account all representative structures obtained by AutoDock and by averaging MM-GB/SA computations on a series of 40 independent MD trajectories, a linear relationship between [Formula: see text](IC[Formula: see text]) and the lowest [Formula: see text] is achieved with [Formula: see text].