Cytochrome P450 3A4 (CYP3A4) metabolizes roughly half of all marketed drugs, and its inhibition can cause clinically significant drug-drug interactions. The enzyme accommodates chemically diverse ligands, making binding modes and metabolic outcomes difficult to predict. Previous X-ray crystallography efforts have leveraged a truncated construct without the N-terminal segment that tethers CYP3A4 to the membrane. Here we show that the same construct assembles into a symmetric trimer that can be resolved by cryo-EM and determine structures of both unliganded and ligand-bound CYP3A4. Multiple ligands are resolved with density consistent with several mutually exclusive conformations. Protein remodeling to reshape the binding pocket is concentrated in the F/G loop, which is poorly resolved and unmodeled in many X-ray structures. These features likely underlie the poor predictive performance of co-folding methods on this target. The routine use of cryo-EM to resolve CYP3A4 ligand-bound complexes will provide the ground truth data needed to make predictive models of drug metabolism useful in practice.
Anna K. Orta, Jan-Hannes Schäfer, G. Correy et al.· bioRxiv· 0 citations
Human herpesvirus (HHV) replication depends on the HHV protease (HHV Pr), an enzyme essential for capsid maturation. Because HHV Pr must transition from an inactive monomer to an active dimer, disrupting dimerization is a promising antiviral strategy. We isolate Fab5, a conformationally selective antibody from a naïve Fab-phage library that recognizes monomeric human cytomegalovirus protease (HCMV) Pr. A 2.6 Å cryo-EM structure reveals Fab5 binds a “latch loop” distal to the active site and dimer interface that secures the C-terminal tail in dimers. Structure-guided mutagenesis in both HCMV Pr and Kaposi’s Sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) Pr confirms the functional importance of a 3-residue motif present in β- and γ-HHV Pr latch loops, validating the mechanistic role of the latch loop in dimerization and activity. Because the latch loop is structurally conserved in all HHV Prs, the cryptic sites they form present an avenue for allosteric inhibitor development. Herpesvirus replication depends on a viral protease that must dimerize to become active. Here, authors discover an inhibitory antibody that reveals a structural latch regulating dimerization, identifying a regulatory element across the viral family.
M. Zimanyi, Kaitlin R. Hulce, M. Bohn et al.· Nature Communications· 0 citations
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