Characterizing the Chemical Space of ERK2 Kinase Inhibitors Using Descriptors Computed from Molecular Dynamics Trajectories

Quantitative Structure–Activity Relationship (QSAR) models typically rely on 2D and 3D molecular descriptors to characterize chemicals and forecast their experimental activities. Previously, we showed that even the most reliable 2D QSAR models and structure-based 3D molecular docking techniques were not capable of accurately ranking a set of known inhibitors for the ERK2 kinase, a key player in various types of cancer. Herein, we calculated and analyzed a series of chemical descriptors computed from the molecular dynamics (MD) trajectories of ERK2-ligand complexes. First, the docking of 87 ERK2 ligands with known binding affinities was accomplished using Schrodinger’s Glide software; then, solvent-explicit MD simulations (20 ns, NPT, 300 K, TIP3P, 1 fs) were performed using the GPU-accelerated Desmond program. Second, we calculated a series of MD descriptors based on the distributions of 3D descriptors computed for representative samples of the ligand’s conformations over the MD simulations. Third, we ana...