Structure-Based Discovery of Inhibitors of the SARS-CoV-2 Nsp14 N7-Methyltransferase
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An under-explored target for SARS-CoV-2 is the S -adenosyl methionine (SAM)-dependent methyltransferase Nsp14, which methylates the N7-guanosine of viral RNA at the 5′-end, allowing the virus to evade host immune response. We sought new Nsp14 inhibitors with three large library docking strategies. First, up to 1.1 billion lead-like molecules were docked against the enzyme’s SAM site, leading to three inhibitors with IC 50 values from 6 to 50 μM. Second, docking a library of 16 million fragments revealed 9 new inhibitors with IC 50 values from 12 to 341 μM. Third, docking a library of 25 million electrophiles to covalently modify Cys387 revealed 7 inhibitors with IC 50 values from 3.5 to 39 μM. Overall, 32 inhibitors encompassing 11 chemotypes had IC 50 values < 50 μM and 5 inhibitors in 4 chemotypes had IC 50 values < 10 μM. These molecules are among the first non-SAM-like inhibitors of Nsp14, providing starting points for future optimization.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".