Virtual Screening and Molecular Docking: Discovering Novel METTL3 Inhibitors
Junyi Yang1,2, Yanwen He1,2, Youkun Kang1,2
1Affiliated Yongkang First People's Hospital and School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Hangzhou Medical College, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 311399, China.
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Methyltransferase-like 3 (METTL3) is an RNA methyltransferase that catalyzes the N6 -methyladenosine (m6A) modification of mRNA in eukaryotic cells. Past studies have shown that METTL3 is highly expressed in various cancers and is closely related to tumor development. Therefore, METTL3 inhibitors have received widespread attention as effective treatments for different types of tumors. This study proposes a hybrid high-throughput virtual screening (HTVS) protocol that combines structure-based methods with geometric deep learning-based DeepDock algorithms. We identified unique skeleton inhibitors of METTL3 from our self-built internal database. Among them, compound C3 showed significant inhibitory activity on METTL3, and further molecular dynamics simulations were performed to provide more details about the binding conformation. Overall, our research demonstrates the effectiveness of hybrid virtual algorithms, which is of great significance for understanding the biological functions of METTL3 and developing treatment methods for related diseases.
