A major cause of the paucity of new starting points for drug discovery is the lack of interaction between academia and industry. Much of the global resource in biology is present in universities, whereas the focus of medicinal chemistry is still largely within industry. Open source drug discovery, with sharing of information, is clearly a first step towards overcoming this gap. But the interface could especially be bridged through a scale-up of open sharing of physical compounds, which would accelerate the finding of new starting points for drug discovery. The Medicines for Malaria Venture Malaria Box is a collection of over 400 compounds representing families of structures identified in phenotypic screens of pharmaceutical and academic libraries against the Plasmodium falciparum malaria parasite. The set has now been distributed to almost 200 research groups globally in the last two years, with the only stipulation that information from the screens is deposited in the public domain. This paper reports for the first time on 236 screens that have been carried out against the Malaria Box and compares these results with 55 assays that were previously published, in a format that allows a meta-analysis of the combined dataset. The combined biochemical and cellular assays presented here suggest mechanisms of action for 135 (34%) of the compounds active in killing multiple life-cycle stages of the malaria parasite, including asexual blood, liver, gametocyte, gametes and insect ookinete stages. In addition, many compounds demonstrated activity against other pathogens, showing hits in assays with 16 protozoa, 7 helminths, 9 bacterial and mycobacterial species, the dengue fever mosquito vector, and the NCI60 human cancer cell line panel of 60 human tumor cell lines. Toxicological, pharmacokinetic and metabolic properties were collected on all the compounds, assisting in the selection of the most promising candidates for murine proof-of-concept experiments and medicinal chemistry programs. The data for all of these assays are presented and analyzed to show how outstanding leads for many indications can be selected. These results reveal the immense potential for translating the dispersed expertise in biological assays involving human pathogens into drug discovery starting points, by providing open access to new families of molecules, and emphasize how a small additional investment made to help acquire and distribute compounds, and sharing the data, can catalyze drug discovery for dozens of different indications. Another lesson is that when multiple screens from different groups are run on the same library, results can be integrated quickly to select the most valuable starting points for subsequent medicinal chemistry efforts.

The budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae contains two homologues of bacterial IscA proteins, designated Isa1p and Isa2p. Bacterial IscA is a product of the isc (iron-sulfur cluster) operon and has been suggested to participate in Fe-S cluster formation or repair. To test the function of yeast Isa1p and Isa2p, single or combinatorial disruptions were introduced in ISA1 and ISA2. The resultant isa⌬ mutants were viable but exhibited a dependency on lysine and glutamate for growth and a respiratory deficiency due to an accumulation of mutations in mitochondrial DNA. As with other yeast genes proposed to function in Fe-S cluster assembly, mitochondrial iron concentration was significantly elevated in the isa mutants, and the activities of the Fe-S cluster-containing enzymes aconitase and succinate dehydrogenase were dramatically reduced. An inspection of Isa-like proteins from bacteria to mammals revealed three invariant cysteine residues, which in the case of Isa1p and Isa2p are essential for function and may be involved in iron binding. As predicted, Isa1p is targeted to the mitochondrial matrix. However, Isa2p is present within the intermembrane space of the mitochondria. Our deletion analyses revealed that Isa2p harbors a bipartite N-terminal leader sequence containing a mitochondrial import signal linked to a second sequence that targets Isa2p to the intermembrane space. Both signals are needed for Isa2p function. A model for the nonredundant roles of Isa1p and Isa2p in delivering iron to sites of the Fe-S cluster assembly is discussed.Iron-sulfur (Fe-S) cluster prosthetic groups play a key role in a wide range of enzymatic reactions, as well as serving as regulatory switches. Key enzymes containing Fe-S clusters include aconitase and succinate dehydrogenase (SDH) in the tricarboxylic acid cycle, the Rieske iron-sulfur protein in the respiratory chain, homoaconitase, which is required for fungal lysine biosynthesis, the nitrogenase iron protein involved in nitrogen fixation, and iron-responsive element binding protein 1, which regulates ferritin and transferrin receptor production in mammals (4,22,32,36,37).The formation of Fe-S clusters has been most thoroughly studied in the case of nitrogenase from the nitrogen-fixing bacterium Azotobacter vinelandii (56). The proteins responsible for the synthesis, maturation, and regulation of nitrogenase are encoded by genes present on the nif operon (19). Two proteins implicated in biosynthesis of the nitrogenase Fe-S cluster include NifS and NifU (19). NifS is a cysteine desulfurase that produces the inorganic sulfide for the cluster (57), whereas NifU is speculated to participate in Fe mobilization for the Fe-S cofactor (11,54,55). An additional protein encoded by nif, Orf6, may also be involved in assembly of the nitrogenase cluster, although its precise role is unknown.The recently identified iscSUA-hscBA-fdx operon from A. vinelandii contains genes exhibiting strong homology to nifS, nifU, and orf6 (55). Additionally, this operon encodes the molecular chaperones Hs...

Human and mouse metallothionein-3 (MT-3) molecules exhibit the same metal binding stoichiometry with Zn(II), Cd(II), or Cu(I) as MT-1 or MT-2 molecules, suggesting that MT-3 consists of two domains enfolding separate polymetallic clusters. The kinetic reactivities of Zn(II) complexes of MT-3 with the chelator ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) or the thiol reagent dithiobis(2-nitrobenzoic acid) (DTNB) resembles the reactivity of ZnMT-1. Furthermore, the candidate alpha and beta domain peptides of human MT-3 are very similar to MT-1 domain peptides in the reactivity of Zn(II) complexes. Zn(II) complexes of human and mouse MT-3 inhibit the survival of rat cortical neurons cultured in the presence of an Alzheimer's disease brain extract. Inhibitory activity is unique to the MT-3 isoform and is a property of the N-terminal beta domain. The inhibitory activity of the 32-residue MT-3 beta domain is abolished by a double mutation within the beta domain resulting in the conversion of the C-P-C-P sequence to either C-S-C-A or C-T-C-T. Thus, the bioactivity arises from a novel structure of the N-terminal beta domain of MT-3 and not any unusual metal-binding properties.

Human neuronal growth inhibitory factor, a metalloprotein classified as metallothionein-3 (MT-3), impairs the survival and the neurite formation of cultured neurons. In these studies the double P7S/P9A mutant (mutMT-3) and single mutants P7S and P9A of human Zn(7)-MT-3 were generated, and their effects on the biological activity and the structure of the protein were examined. The biological results clearly established the necessity of both proline residues for the inhibitory activity, as even single mutants were found to be inactive. Using electronic absorption, circular dichroism (CD), magnetic CD (MCD), and (113)Cd NMR spectroscopy, the structural features of the metal-thiolate clusters in the double mutant Cd(7)-mutMT-3 were investigated and compared with those of wild-type Cd(7)-MT-3 [Faller, P., Hasler, D. W., Zerbe, O., Klauser, S., Winge, D. R., and Vasák, M. (1999) Biochemistry 38, 10158] and the well characterized Cd(7)-MT-2a from rabbit liver. Similarly to (113)Cd(7)-MT-3 the (113)Cd NMR spectrum of (113)Cd(7)-mutMT-3 at 298 K revealed four major and three minor resonances (approximately 20% of the major ones) between 590 and 680 ppm, originating from a Cd(4)S(11) cluster in the alpha-domain and a Cd(3)S(9) cluster in the beta-domain, respectively. Due to the presence of dynamic processes in the structure of MT-3 and mutMT-3, all resonances showed the absence of resolved homonuclear [(113)Cd-(113)Cd] couplings and large apparent line widths (between 140 and 350 Hz). However, whereas in (113)Cd(7)-mutMT-3 the temperature rise to 323 K resulted in a major recovery of the originally NMR nondetectable population of the Cd(3)S(9) cluster resonances, no such temperature effect was observed in (113)Cd(7)-MT-3. To account for the observed NMR features, a dynamic structural model for the beta-domain is proposed, which involves a folded and a partially unfolded state. It is suggested that in the partially unfolded state a slow cis/trans isomerization of Cys-Pro(7) or Cys-Pro(9) amide bonds in (113)Cd(7)-MT-3 takes place and that this process represents a rate-limiting step in a correct domain refolding. In addition, closely similar apparent stability constants of human MT-3, mutMT-3, and rabbit MT-2a with Cd(II) and Zn(II) ions were found. These results suggest that specific structural features dictated by the repetitive (Cys-Pro)(2) sequence in the beta-domain of MT-3 and not its altered metal binding affinity compared to MT-1/MT-2 isoforms are responsible for the biological activity of this protein.