Journal of Structural Biology, Vol.184, No.2, 293-300, 2013
Binding sites and hydrophobic pockets in Human Thioredoxin 1 determined by normal mode analysis
The Thioredoxin (Trx) system plays important roles in several diseases (e.g. cancer, viral infections, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases). Therefore, there is a therapeutic interest in the design of modulators of this system. In this work, we used normal mode analysis to identify putative binding site regions for Human Trx1 that arise from global motions. We identified three possible inhibitor's binding regions that corroborate previous experimental findings. We show that intrinsic motions of the protein are related to the exposure of hydrophobic regions and non-active site cysteines that could constitute new binding sites for inhibitors. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords:Molecular modeling;Normal mode analysis;Human Thioredoxin 1;Binding sites;Allosteric inhibition