In-silico targeting TMPK from monkey pox virus: Molecular docking analysis, density functional theory studies and molecular dynamic simulation analysis

Abstract

The World Health Organization (WHO) proclaimed the monkeypox epidemic a "public health emergency of worldwide significance" recently. The monkeypox virus is a member of the same Orthopoxvirus genus as the smallpox virus. Although smallpox medications are advised against monkeypox, no monkeypox-specific drugs are currently available. In the event of such an outbreak, in-silico medication identification is a practical and efficient strategy. As a result, we report a computational drug repurposing analysis to discover medicines that may be potential inhibitors of thymidylate kinase, a critical monkeypox viral enzyme. The target protein structure of the monkeypox virus was modeled using the vaccinia virus’s homologous protein structure. Using molecular docking and density functional theory, we found 11 possible inhibitors of the monkeypox virus from an Asinex library of 261120 chemicals. The primary purpose of this in silico work is to find possible inhibitors of monkeypox viral proteins that can then be experimentally tested in order to develop innovative therapeutic medicines for monkeypox infection.

Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma

Keywords:

• In silico study
• Monkeypox virus
• Thymidylate kinase
• TMPK
• molecular docking
• DFT

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that supports the findings of this study are available in the supplementary materials of this article.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.