IDENTIFYING INHIBITORS OF PROTEASE OF CHIKUNGUNYA VIRUS

Abstract

To date, no suitable vaccine or specific antiviral drug is available to treat Chikungunya viral (CHIKV) fever. Therefore, it is essential to identify drug candidates that could potentially impede CHIKV infection. Here I present the work to identify inhibitors of a nsp2 protease of chikungunya which helps in cleavage of polyproteins and thus in virulence of chikungunya. An inhibitor was made in computationally using the substrate of the enzyme. Using this inhibitor, virtual libraries namely ZINC database and CHEMBL were screened to identify molecules which can be the potent inhibitors of the enzyme. Then docking is done to calculate the binding energy of the target-inhibitor complex using DSX-ONLINE docking server. Twelve top compounds were found to have good docking scores. These could inhibit the virulence of this virus by blocking the enzyme.