Inhibitors that covalently damage proteins or nucleic acids offer great potency, but are difficult to rationally design and suffer from poor specificity. Here we outline a general concept for constructing covalent inhibitors, called the two-component covalent inhibitor (TCCI). The approach takes advantage of two ligand analogs equipped with pre-reactive groups. Binding of the analogs to the adjacent sites of a target biopolymer brings the pre-reactive groups in close proximity and causes their interaction followed by covalent damage of the target. In the present study we used light-activated pre-reactive groups to inactivate a DNA polymerase. It was found that the efficiency of a traditional single-component inhibitor was greatly reduced in the presence of a non-target protein, while the TCCI was not significantly affected. Our findings suggest that TCCI approach has advantages in inactivation of biopolymers in complex multi-component systems. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Evan M Cornett, Yulia V Gerasimova, Dmitry M Kolpashchikov. Two-component covalent inhibitor. Bioorganic & medicinal chemistry. 2013 Apr 01;21(7):1988-91
PMID: 23411398
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