Understanding the selectivity of inhibitors toward PI4KIIIα and PI4KIIIβ based molecular modeling

Type III phosphatidylinositol 4 kinases (PI4KIIIs) are essential enzymes that are related to the replication of multiple RNA viruses. Understanding the interaction mechanisms of molecular compounds with the alpha and beta isoforms of PI4KIII (PI4KIIIα and PI4KIIIβ) is of significance in the development of inhibitors that can bind to these two enzymes selectively. In this work, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and binding free energy calculations were combined to investigate the binding modes of seven selected compounds to PI4KIIIα and PI4KIIIβ. Analyses based on MD trajectories provide detailed interaction mechanisms of these compounds with PI4KIIIα and PI4KIIIβ at the atomic level, and indicate that the selectivity of these compounds is mainly due to the structural difference of the binding pockets. It is expected that the detailed binding information found in this study can provide useful help for the structure-based design of selective inhibitors toward PI4KIIIα and PI4KIIIβ.