Frontiers in Chemistry (Mar 2021)

Discovery of New α-Glucosidase Inhibitors: Structure-Based Virtual Screening and Biological Evaluation

  • Shan-Kui Liu,
  • Haifang Hao,
  • Yuan Bian,
  • Yong-Xi Ge,
  • Shengyuan Lu,
  • Hong-Xu Xie,
  • Kai-Ming Wang,
  • Hongrui Tao,
  • Chao Yuan,
  • Juan Zhang,
  • Jie Zhang,
  • Cheng-Shi Jiang,
  • Kongkai Zhu,
  • Kongkai Zhu

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fchem.2021.639279
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 9

Abstract

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α-Glycosidase inhibitors could inhibit the digestion of carbohydrates into glucose and promote glucose conversion, which have been used for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. In the present study, 52 candidates of α-glycosidase inhibitors were selected from commercial Specs compound library based on molecular docking–based virtual screening. Four different scaffold compounds (7, 22, 37, and 44) were identified as α-glycosidase inhibitors with IC50 values ranging from 9.99 to 35.19 μM. All these four compounds exerted better inhibitory activities than the positive control (1-deoxynojirimycin, IC50 = 52.02 μM). The fluorescence quenching study and kinetic analysis revealed that all these compounds directly bind to α-glycosidase and belonged to the noncompetitive α-glycosidase inhibitors. Then, the binding modes of these four compounds were carefully investigated. Significantly, these four compounds showed nontoxicity (IC50 > 100 μM) toward the human normal hepatocyte cell line (LO2), which indicated the potential of developing into novel candidates for type 2 diabetes treatment.

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