用AI破解蠕虫暗蛋白组,发现543个潜在药物靶点
Decoding the dark proteome: Deep learning-enabled discovery of druggable enzymes in Wuchereria bancrofti
- 构建深度学习管道,精准预测寄生虫未注释蛋白的酶分类
- 发现543个新酶类,筛选出6个高潜力药物靶点
- 适合寄生虫药研发者、结构生物学与计算药物发现团队
淋巴丝虫病由班氏丝虫(Wuchereria bancrofti)引起,已导致超过3600万人永久残疾,全球有6.57亿人面临感染风险。该寄生虫超过90%的蛋白质功能未知,严重阻碍药物研发。本文提出一种新型计算流程,将未注释的氨基酸序列转化为精确的四层酶学委员会(EC)编号,并生成候选药物。利用DEtection TRansformer估算酶功能概率,基于4,476个标注寄生虫蛋白微调分层最近邻EC预测器,并采用拒绝采样保留100%置信度的四层EC分类。该流程为14,772个未表征蛋白赋予精确EC编号,发现543个此前未知的酶类。通过寄生虫特异性、化学可成药性、生化重要性与生物学合理性等五种策略,筛选出6个靶点:抗沃尔巴克体细胞壁抑制、蛋白水解阻断、传播干扰、嘌呤能免疫干扰及cGMP信号失稳。从ChEMBL和BindingDB整理出43种化合物,使用Boltz-2对多构象蛋白进行共折叠,所有目标均显示低于1微摩尔的预测结合亲和力,其中黏菌素类似物对肽聚糖糖基转移酶及NTPase抑制剂展现出纳摩尔级活性和清晰结合口袋。尽管需实验验证,本研究首次建立班氏丝虫暗蛋白组的大规模功能图谱,显著加速早期药物开发。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Wuchereria bancrofti, the parasitic roundworm responsible for lymphatic filariasis, permanently disables over 36 million people and places 657 million at risk across 39 countries. A major bottleneck for drug discovery is the lack of functional annotation for more than 90 percent of the W. bancrofti dark proteome, leaving many potential targets unidentified. In this work, we present a novel computational pipeline that converts W. bancrofti's unannotated amino acid sequence data into precise four-level Enzyme Commission (EC) numbers and drug candidates. We utilized a DEtection TRansformer to estimate the probability of enzymatic function, fine-tuned a hierarchical nearest neighbor EC predictor on 4,476 labeled parasite proteins, and applied rejection sampling to retain only four-level EC classifications at 100 percent confidence. This pipeline assigned precise EC numbers to 14,772 previously uncharacterized proteins and discovered 543 EC classes not previously known in W. bancrofti. A qualitative triage emphasizing parasite-specific targets, chemical tractability, biochemical importance, and biological plausibility prioritized six enzymes across five separate strategies: anti-Wolbachia cell-wall inhibition, proteolysis blockade, transmission disruption, purinergic immune interference, and cGMP-signaling destabilization. We curated a 43-compound library from ChEMBL and BindingDB and co-folded across multiple protein conformers with Boltz-2. All six targets exhibited at least moderately strong predicted binding affinities below 1 micromolar, with moenomycin analogs against peptidoglycan glycosyltransferase and NTPase inhibitors showing promising nanomolar hits and well-defined binding pockets. While experimental validation remains essential, our results provide the first large-scale functional map of the W. bancrofti dark proteome and accelerate early-stage drug development for the species.
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