Agonists of G-Protein-Coupled Odorant Receptors Are Predicted from Chemical Features

J Phys Chem Lett. 2018 May 3;9(9):2235-2240. doi: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.8b00633. Epub 2018 Apr 17.

Abstract

Predicting the activity of chemicals for a given odorant receptor is a longstanding challenge. Here the activity of 258 chemicals on the human G-protein-coupled odorant receptor (OR)51E1, also known as prostate-specific G-protein-coupled receptor 2 (PSGR2), was virtually screened by machine learning using 4884 chemical descriptors as input. A systematic control by functional in vitro assays revealed that a support vector machine algorithm accurately predicted the activity of a screened library. It allowed us to identify two novel agonists in vitro for OR51E1. The transferability of the protocol was assessed on OR1A1, OR2W1, and MOR256-3 odorant receptors, and, in each case, novel agonists were identified with a hit rate of 39-50%. We further show how ligands' efficacy is encoded into residues within OR51E1 cavity using a molecular modeling protocol. Our approach allows widening the chemical spaces associated with odorant receptors. This machine-learning protocol based on chemical features thus represents an efficient tool for screening ligands for G-protein-coupled odorant receptors that modulate non-olfactory functions or, upon combinatorial activation, give rise to our sense of smell.

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Drug Evaluation, Preclinical
  • Fatty Acids / chemistry
  • Fatty Acids / metabolism*
  • Humans
  • Ligands
  • Machine Learning*
  • Mice
  • Models, Molecular
  • Neoplasm Proteins / agonists*
  • Neoplasm Proteins / chemistry
  • Protein Binding
  • Receptors, G-Protein-Coupled / agonists*
  • Receptors, G-Protein-Coupled / chemistry
  • Receptors, Odorant / agonists
  • Receptors, Odorant / chemistry

Substances

  • Fatty Acids
  • Ligands
  • Neoplasm Proteins
  • OR1A1 protein, human
  • OR51E1 protein, human
  • Olfr124 protein, mouse
  • Receptors, G-Protein-Coupled
  • Receptors, Odorant
  • pelargonic acid