Browsing by Subject "molekyylidynamiikka"

Orexin receptors have gained more attention due to increased knowledge of their physiological significance. The successful development of orexin receptor antagonists treating insomnia has enlarged the scope of research leading to an interest in developing small molecule agonists that have drug-like properties and induce activation in the orexinergic system. Transforming this idea into reality has remained an unaccomplished challenge. In this work, molecular mechanism of activation in orexin receptor type 2 is studied by conducting molecular dynamics simulations after capturing coordinates of active and inactive state crystal structures. The crystal structure coordinates define the starting pose for the protein and the ligand in the simulations. Preliminary steps prior to simulation include building the surrounding system and model building in which homology modeling is employed to reconstruct missing loops. A 100-nanosecond simulation is executed for both models. Active and inactive state models display stable binding event characteristics when examining the coordinate changes of every atom during the simulation. No major conformational changes are observed. The most congruent feature relative to the literature is the difference in the interactive role of residue Q3x32 between the simulations. The agonist forms two consistent hydrogen bonds with the upward-shifted Q3x32 while an inactive downward-facing version is observed in the antagonist model. Some residues present unexpected features omitting comparative functions of literature, which along with general inconsistency of protein-ligand contacts undermine the reliability of models heavily. The simulations conducted need to be extended to produce a hypothesis for the activation mechanism because of the defects around simulation protocols and the low quantity of simulation runs.