How do cryptic pockets form?

Earlier this year we highlighted crystallographic work out of Astex showing that secondary ligand binding sites on proteins are common; in addition to an active site, an enzyme may have several other pockets capable of binding small molecules. Many of these secondary sites are present even in the absence of a ligand. But there are also “cryptic” binding pockets that only appear when a ligand is bound. These are the subject of a new paper in J. Am. Chem. Soc. by Francesco Gervasio and collaborators at University College London and UCB Pharma.

Cryptic pockets are appealing in part because they can salvage an otherwise unligandable target: a featureless flat surface involved in a protein-protein interaction may crack open to reveal a crevasse capable of binding small molecules. Finding these pockets computationally, though, is difficult. In the current paper, the researchers performed molecular dynamics simulations on three different proteins with known cryptic pockets, and the pockets remained mostly closed over hundreds of nanoseconds. Increasing the temperature didn’t help, and even when the simulations were started with structures of the protein-small molecule complexes (with the small molecules removed), the pockets quickly slammed shut. Further calculations suggested that the open forms of the proteins are thermodynamically unstable.

The nice thing about computational approaches is that – unlike Scotty – you can change the laws of physics. In this case, the researchers changed the simulated water molecules to be more attractive to carbon and sulfur atoms in the proteins. (They call this SWISH, for Sampling Water Interfaces through Scaled Hamiltonians). This caused the known cryptic sites to open up during molecular dynamics simulations, even in the absence of ligand.

Next, the researchers added very small fragments (such as benzene), and found that these caused the cryptic pockets to open even further. The researchers speculate that this might reflect how cryptic pockets form in the real world: a ligand could worm its way into a transient pocket, stabilizing it and exposing more room for another ligand (or a different part of the first ligand) to bind.

Of course, just because something shows up in silico doesn’t make it real; how do you avoid false positives? Once the researchers found cryptic pockets using “enhanced” water, they reran simulations using standard parameters to see which pockets remained. The researchers found that subtracting the “density” of fragments bound in a conventional molecular dynamics simulation from the density of fragments in a SWISH simulation causes minor, irrelevant pockets to disappear for their three test proteins, leaving only the known cryptic pockets. Running this subtraction experiment on the protein ubiquitin caused a couple weak superficial pockets to disappear, consistent with the absence of cryptic pockets in this protein.

SWISH is an interesting approach, and I look forward to seeing how it compares with other programs, such as Fragment Hotspots and FTMap. It would also be fun to apply SWISH prospectively to therapeutically important but currently undruggable targets to see whether it is worth taking another look at some of them.