Podocytes are crucial cells of the glomerular filtration unit and playing a vital role at the interface of the blood-urine barrier. Podocyte slit-diaphragm is a modified tight junction that facilitates size and shape-dependent permselectivity. Several proteins including podocin, nephrin, CD2AP, and TRPC6 form a macromolecular assembly and constitute the slit-diaphragm. Podocin is an integral membrane protein attached to the inner membrane of the podocyte via a short transmembrane region (101-125). The cytosolic N-and C-terminus help podocin to attain a hooklike structure. Podocin shares 44% homology with stomatin family proteins and similar to the stomatin proteins, podocin was shown to associate into higher-order oligomers at the site of slitdiaphragm. However, the stoichiometry of the homo-oligomers and how it partakes in the macromolecular assemblies with other slit-diaphragm proteins remains elusive. Here we investigated the oligomeric propensity of a truncated podocin construct (residues:126-350). We show that the podocin domain majorly homo-oligomerize into a 16mer. Circular dichroism and fluorescence spectroscopy suggest that the 16mer oligomer has considerable secondary structure and moderate tertiary packing.

A series of triazole conjugated novel 2,4-disubstituted thiazole derivatives (9a-l) were synthesized from salicylaldehyde. These new chemical entities were characterized by their IR, 1H & 13C NMR, mass spectral data and their molecular docking studies were performed to identify potential inhibitors of CDK2 protein. The synthesized analogs 9a-l were docked with CDK2 protein (PDB: 1GIJ). Among these 9h, 9j and 9k showed better Glide score, Prime MM-GBSA and ADME properties as compared to seliciclib and dinaciclib cancer inhibiting drugs of CDK2 protein. The amino acid Val83 of CDK2 protein was consistently binding to new chemical entities indicating that amino acid is crucial and responsible for its inhibition. Present findings suggested that compound 9h has 100% human oral absorption with highest Glide score -8.3kcal/mol whereas drug molecules have feebler binding capacity and less Glide score indicating that the synthesized new chemical entity as potential inhibitor for CDK2 protein.