Natural product-inspired esters and amides of ferulic and caffeic acid as dual inhibitors of HIV-1 reverse transcriptase

Abstract Using an HIV-1 Reverse Transcriptase (RT)-associated RNase H inhibition assay as lead, bioguided fractionation of the dichloromethane extract of the Ocimum sanctum leaves led to the isolation of five triterpenes ( 1–5 ) along with three 3-methoxy-4-hydroxy phenyl derivatives ( 6 – 8 ). The structure of this isolates were determined by 1D and 2D NMR experiments as well as ESI-MS. Tetradecyl ferulate ( 8 ) showed an interesting RNase H IC 50 value of 12.4 μM and due to the synthetic accessibility of this secondary metabolite, a structure-activity relationship study was carried out. A series of esters and amides of ferulic and caffeic acids were synthesized and, among all, the most active was N-oleylcaffeamide displaying a strong inhibitory activity towards both RT-associated functions, ribonuclease H and DNA polymerase. Molecular modeling studies together with Yonetani-Theorell analysis, demonstrated that N-oleylcaffeamide is able to bind both two allosteric site located one close to the NNRTI binding pocket and the other close to RNase H catalytic site.