Discovery of atorvastatin as a tetramer stabilizer of nuclear receptor RXRα through structure-based virtual screening
作者:Xin Wang、Shuyi Chong、Huiyun Lin、Zhiqiang Yan、Fengyu Huang、Zhiping Zeng、Xiaokun Zhang、Ying Su
DOI:10.1016/j.bioorg.2019.01.007
日期:2019.4
Retinoid X receptor alpha (RXR alpha), a central member of the nuclear receptor superfamily and a key regulator of many signal transduction pathways, has been an attractive drug target. We previously discovered that an N-terminally truncated form of RXR alpha can be induced by specific ligands to form homotetramers, which, as a result of conformational selection, forms the basis for inhibiting the nongenomic activation of RXR alpha. Here, we report the identification and characterization of atorvastatin as a new RXR alpha tetramer stabilizer by using structure based virtual screening and demonstrate that virtual library screening can be used to aid in identifying RXR alpha ligands that can induce its tetramerization. In this study, docking was applied to screen the FDA-approved small molecule drugs in the DrugBank 4.0 collection. Two compounds were selected and purchased for testing. We showed that the selected atorvastatin could bind to RXR alpha to promote RXR alpha-LBD tetramerization. We also showed that atorvastatin possessed RXR alpha-dependent apoptotic effects. In addition, we used a chemical approach to aid in the studies of the binding mode of atorvastatin.