TY  - JOUR
AU  - Kiss, Róbert
AU  - Csizmadia, Georgina
AU  - Solti, Katalin
AU  - Keresztes, Attila
AU  - Zhu, Max
AU  - Pickhardt, Marcus
AU  - Mandelkow, Eckhard
AU  - Tóth, Gergely
TI  - Structural Basis of Small Molecule Targetability of Monomeric Tau Protein.
JO  - ACS chemical neuroscience
VL  - 9
IS  - 12
SN  - 1948-7193
CY  - Washington, DC
PB  - ACS Publ.
M1  - DZNE-2020-06726
SP  - 2997 - 3006
PY  - 2018
AB  - The therapeutic targeting of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) by small molecules has been a challenge due to their heterogeneous conformational ensembles. A potential therapeutic strategy to alleviate the aggregation of IDPs is to maintain them in their native monomeric state by small molecule binding. This study investigates the structural basis of small molecule druggability of native monomeric Tau whose aggregation is linked to the onset of Tauopathies such as Alzheimer's disease. Initially, two available monomeric conformational ensembles of a shorter Tau construct K18 (also termed Tau4RD) were analyzed which revealed striking structural differences between the two ensembles, while similar number of hot spots and small molecule binding sites were identified on monomeric Tau ensembles as on tertiary folded proteins of similar size. Remarkably, some critical fibril forming sequence regions of Tau (V306-K311, V275-K280) participated in hot spot formation with higher frequency compared to other regions. As an example of small molecule binding to monomeric Tau, it was shown that methylene blue (MB) bound to monomeric K18 and full-length Tau selectively with high affinity (Kd = 125.8 nM and 86.6 nM, respectively) with binding modes involving Cys291 and Cys322, previously reported to be oxidized in the presence of MB. Overall, our results provide structure-based evidence that Tau can be a viable drug target for small molecules and indicate that specific small molecules may be able to bind to monomeric Tau and influence the way in which the protein interacts among itself and with other proteins.
KW  - Humans
KW  - Intrinsically Disordered Proteins: metabolism
KW  - Methylene Blue: metabolism
KW  - Molecular Docking Simulation
KW  - Molecular Targeted Therapy
KW  - Neurofibrillary Tangles: metabolism
KW  - Protein Structure, Tertiary
KW  - Tauopathies: metabolism
KW  - tau Proteins: chemistry
KW  - tau Proteins: metabolism
KW  - tau Proteins: ultrastructure
KW  - Intrinsically Disordered Proteins (NLM Chemicals)
KW  - MAPT protein, human (NLM Chemicals)
KW  - tau Proteins (NLM Chemicals)
KW  - Methylene Blue (NLM Chemicals)
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
C6  - pmid:29944336
DO  - DOI:10.1021/acschemneuro.8b00182
UR  - https://pub.dzne.de/record/140404
ER  -