Computational mutation scanning and drug resistance mechanisms of HIV-1 protease inhibitors

The drug resistance of various clinically available HIV-1 protease inhibitors has been studied using a new computational protocol, that is, computational mutation scanning (CMS), leading to valuable insights into the resistance mechanisms and structure-resistance correction of the HIV-1 protease inhibitors associated with a variety of active site and nonactive site mutations. By using the CMS method, the calculated mutation-caused shifts of the binding free energies linearly correlate very well with those derived from the corresponding experimental data, suggesting that the CMS protocol may be used as a generalized approach to predict drug resistance associated with amino acid mutations. Because it is essentially important for understanding the structure-resistance correlation and for structure-based drug design to develop an effective computational protocol for drug resistance prediction, the reasonable and computationally efficient CMS protocol for drug resistance prediction should be valuable for future structure-based design and discovery of antiresistance drugs in various therapeutic areas.