IN SILICO ANALYSIS OF CARNOSIC ACID'S THERAPEUTIC POTENTIAL AS A MULTITARGET INHIBITOR AGAINST NIPAH VIRUS REPLICATION

Abstract

In 2023 the Kozhikode district of Kerala, a zoonotic virus with a high mortality rate (40%-70%) infected six people and took two lives. And the downside is that there is no approved medicine against this virus. This offender is a very small 40nm 1900nm virus of paramyxoviridae family named as Nipah Virus, named for the Malaysian island of Sungai Nipah, where it was first discovered in 1999. It is endemic to Southeast-Asia and Western Pacific specially Bangladesh and India. Fruit bats, the natural reservoir of Nipah Virus are the ones who can transmit the infection to both humans and animals. In this paper we conducted an in-silico assessment of the ability of Carnosic Acid to inhibit Nipah Virus Proteins. The study made use of a number of computational tools, including BioVia Discovery Studio, Auto dock Tools, UCSF Chimera and PyRx Virtual Screening Tool. The results revealed that ligand was a potent inhibitor of Nucleoprotein (4CO6), Phosphoprotein (4N5B) and Large Protein (RNA dependent RNA Polymerase) (Modelled) with docking score of -7.6 kcal/mol, -7.4 kcal/mol and -7.7 kcal/mol, respectively, which is better than that of the standard control Ribavirin. However, the molecule was found to be class 3 toxic in toxicity testing and had a LD50 value of 287mg/kg. We have also explicated the roles of various viral proteins of Nipah Virus in its pathogenicity and infection process to try to determine the likelihood of preparing efficient inhibitors against them.