QSAR modeling, molecular docking and molecular dynamic simulation of phosphorus-substituted quinoline derivatives as topoisomerase I inhibitors

As they facilitate the cleavage of single and double stranded DNA to relax supercoils, unwind catenanes, and condense chromosomes in eukaryotic cells, Topoisomerase plays crucial roles in cellular reproduction and DNA organization. Because the unrepaired single and double stranded DNA breaks these complexes generate might result in apoptosis and cell death, they are cytotoxic agents. In this study, 28 compounds derived from phosphorus-substituted quinoline are subjected to a quantitative structure–activity relationship (QSAR) using partial least squares, principal component regression, and multiple linear regression. The Gaussian 09 software and the Molecular Operating Environment program were used to calculate molecular descriptors. The anti-proliferative activity was correlated with a variety of electronic and structural characteristics of the molecules, such as EHOMO (energy of the highest occupied molecular orbital) and ELUMO (energy of the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital), which provided evidence for the modeling. The B3LYP/6-31G (d, p) level of theory's Density Functional Theory (DFT) approach was used to compute these electronic properties, and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to test for collinearity between the descriptors. In fact, three alternative prediction models were created using various 2D and 3D descriptor counts, and they were each assessed using the statistical metrics of coefficient of determination (R2) and root mean squared error (RMSE). A MLR model had the best predictive performance of all the constructed models, as indicated by R2 and RMSE of 0.865 and 0.316, respectively. Three proteins (6G77, 2NS2, and 5K47) for lung, ovarian, and kidney malignancies showed strong binding affinities via hydrophobic interactions and H-bonds with the pertinent chemicals by crystal structure modeling. Compounds C11, C19 and C26, respectively, showed the highest binding energy for ovarian, kidney and lung cancer. The outcomes of the molecular dynamic MD simulation diagram were produced to support the molecular docking findings from earlier research, which demonstrated that inhibitors were stable in the active sites of the selected proteins for 10 ns. This raises the possibility that these chemicals could serve as a valuable model for the development and synthesis of more effective anticancer prospects.