Molecular dynamics simulations exploring drug resistance in HIV-1 proteases

Although HIV-1 subtype B still dominates the epidemic AIDS in developed countries, an increasing number of people in developing countries are suffering from an epidemic of non-subtype B viruses. What is worse, the efficacy of the combinational use of an-tiretroviral drugs is gradually compromised by the rapid development of drug resistance. To gain an insight into drug resistance, 10-ns MD simulations were simultaneously conducted on the complexes of the TL-3 inhibitor with 4 different proteases (B_wt, B_mut, F_wt and F_mut), among which the complex of the B_wt protease with the TL-3 inhibitor was treated as the control group. Detailed analyses of MD data indicated that the drug resistance of B_mut against TL-3 mainly derived from loss of an important hydrogen bond and that of F_wt was caused by the decrease of hydrophobic interactions in S1/S1’ pocket, while both of the two reasons mentioned above were the cause of the F_mut protease’s resistance. These results are in good agreement with the previous experiments, revealing a possible mechanism of drug resistance for the aforementioned protease subtypes against the TL-3 inhibitor. Additionally, another indication was obtained that the mutations of M36I, V82A and L90M may induce structural transforms so as to alter the inhibitor’s binding mode.