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Updated: May 20, 2026

Pairwise Growth Competition Assay for Determining the Replication Fitness of Human Immunodeficiency Viruses
Published on: May 4, 2015
Comprehensive model of wild-type and mutant HIV-1 reverse transciptases
Flavio Ballante1, Ira Musmuca, Garland R Marshall
1Rome Center for Molecular Design, Dipartimento di Chimica e Tecnologie del Farmaco, Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy.
Abstract:
An enhanced version of COMBINE that uses both ligand-based and structure-based alignment of ligands has been used to build a comprehensive 3-D QSAR model of wild-type HIV-1 reverse transcriptase and drug-resistant mutants. The COMBINEr model focused on 7 different RT enzymes complexed with just two HIV-RT inhibitors, niverapine (NVP) and efavirenz (EFV); therefore, 14 inhibitor/enzyme complexes comprised the training set. An external test set of chiral 2-(alkyl/aryl)amino-6-benzylpyrimidin-4(3H)-ones (DABOs) was used to test predictability. The COMBINEr model MC4, although developed using only two inhibitors, predicted the experimental activities of the test set with an acceptable average absolute error of prediction (0.89 pK (i)). Most notably, the model was able to correctly predict the right eudismic ratio for two R/S pairs of DABO derivatives. The enhanced COMBINEr approach was developed using only software freely available to academics.
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