MB‐Isoster: A software for bioisosterism simulation

• Published in: Journal of computational chemistry Vol. 39; no. 29; pp. 2481 - 2487
• Main Authors: Elias, Thiago Castilho, de Oliveira, Humberto César Brandão, da Silveira, Nelson José Freitas
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hoboken, USA John Wiley & Sons, Inc 05.11.2018; Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
• Subjects: Biological activity; Chemical properties; chemoinformatics; computational chemistry; Computer simulation; Coordination compounds; drug development; Lead compounds; Ligands; Organic chemistry; Physical chemistry; Software; chemoinformatics; drug development; computational chemistry
• ISSN: 0192-8651; 1096-987X
• DOI: 10.1002/jcc.25581

Bioisosterism is a technique used in medicinal chemistry to optimize lead compounds in drug research. One can replace a substituent group in original molecule by another with similar physical chemistry properties and then test how this replacement affects biological activity. To help researchers in their bioisosteric replacement choose, computational efforts such as programs and databases was developed. In this article, it is presented MB‐Isoster, a software that draws bioisosteric molecules. Starting from an input molecule, user selects a molecular subregion formed by connected atoms to be replaced and MB‐Isoster queries an internal library to find bioisosteric substituents for selected subregion, and makes the bioisosteres. Another functionality is receptor–ligand pdb complex reading, in which nonbonded interactions are computed between receptor and ligand in a pdb file, helping in atom/subregion selection to bioisosteric replacement. Physical‐chemical properties computing, and virtual screening evaluation is also available. MB‐Isoster is freely available at http://molmod-cs.unifal-mg.edu.br/tools.html. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. MB‐Isoster is a graphical user interface program in computational chemistry developed to help drug designer researchers. This program makes new molecules from an input molecule based on bioisosteric replacement. It employs bioisosterism principles, which are based on similar physical chemistry properties between different chemical groups in which interchanging these substituents in a molecular structure remains common biological activity. Bioisosterism can be used to improve a drug candidate molecule, thus, MB‐Isoster helps suggesting bioisosteric replacements.