The Application of Information Spectrum Method on Small Molecules and Target Recognition

Current methods for investigation of receptor - ligand interactions in drug discovery are based on three-dimensional complementarity of receptor and ligand surfaces, and they include pharmacophore modelling, QSAR, molecular docking etc. Those methods only consider short-range molecular interactions (distances 5A) which are essential for kinetic of biochemical reactions because they influence the number of productive collisions between interacting molecules. Previously was shown that the electron-ion interaction potential (EIIP) represents the physical property which determines the long-range properties of biological molecules. This molecular descriptor served as a base for development of the informational spectrum method (ISM), a virtual spectroscopy method for investigation of protein-protein interactions. In this paper, we proposed a new approach to treat small molecules as linear entities, allowing study of the small molecule - protein interaction by ISM. We analyzed here 21 sets of KEGG drug-protein interactions and showed that this new approach allows an efficient discrimination between biologically active and inactive ligands, and consistence with AA regions of their binding site on the target protein.