Kristine Senkane, Ekaterina Vinogradova, Radu Suciu, Vincent Crowley, Balyn Zaro, Michael Bradshaw ,Ken Brameld, Benjamin Cravatt
Angew. Chem. 2019
doi:10.1002/ange.201905829
Reversible covalency, achieved with, for instance, highly electron‐deficient olefins, offers a compelling strategy to design chemical probes and drugs that benefit from the sustained target engagement afforded by irreversible compounds, while avoiding permanent protein modification that persists following unfolding and/or proteolytic processing. So far, reversible covalency has mainly been evaluated for cysteine residues in individual kinases and the broader potential for this strategy to engage cysteines across the proteome remains unexplored. Here we describe a mass‐spectrometry‐based platform that integrates gel filtration (GF) with activity‐based protein profiling (ABPP) to assess cysteine residues across the human proteome for both irreversible and reversible interactions with small‐molecule electrophiles. Using this method, we identify numerous cysteine residues from diverse protein classes that are reversibly engaged by cyanoacrylamide fragment electrophiles, revealing the broad potential for reversible covalency as a strategy for chemical probe discovery.
Linking of fragments in neighboring binding sites is one of the optimization strategies in fragment-based drug discovery, where additive or even more substantial bioactivity improvements can be realized. However, such efforts present a considerable challenge when one fragment binds covalently to the target protein, as small modifications can influence the correct positioning of the covalent warhead toward the targeted nucleophilic residue. Here, we present a case study of fragment linking that yielded single-digit micromolar, covalent inhibitors of the SARS-CoV-2 main protease, starting from fragments that were inactive in the biochemical assay. Using structural information from a recent, high-throughput crystallographic fragment screen, we show that the success of fragment linking in the design of targeted covalent inhibitors is heavily impacted by several factors, including the warhead type, the labeling chemistry, and even subtle changes in the designed linker. Notably, we observe that induced fit effects might override the original fragment orientations in the linked molecule, highlighting the need for reliable structure verification, especially in consecutive rounds of fragment elaboration.
Levente Kollár, Levente M. Mihalovits, Dávid Bajusz, DamijanKnez, József Simon, Blake H. Balcomb, Daren Fearon, Stanislav Gobec, György M. K...
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Design, synthesis and biological evaluation of the activity-based probes for FGFR covalent inhibitorDandan Zhu, Zijian Zheng, Huixin Huang, Xiaojuan Chen, Shuhong Zhang, Zhuchu Chen, Ting Liu, Guangyu Xu, Ying Fu, Yongheng Chen, European Jo...
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DOI Ansgar Oberheide, Maxime van den Oetelaar, Jakob Scheele, Jan Borggräfe, Semmy Engelen, Michael Sattler, Christian Ottmann, ...
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Yoav Shamir, Nir London bioRxiv 2025.03.19.642201 doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.19.642201 Recent years have seen an explosion in the...
