Recently, professor Guang-Fu Yang’s Group has made significant progress on green pesticide design methodology. Related work and result have been published in the top international authoritative academic journal “Nucleic Acids Research” (Nucleic Acids Research 2016, 44, W550-W556. IF=9.2).
As an important part of agriculture, agricultural chemicals are import weapons to fight against pests and naturaldisaster. However, discovery of new pesticide has become more and more difficult due to the growing consideration for safety. Finding an efficient and fast way for green pesticide designing has become one of the core issue faced by agricultural scientists.
Designing of new pesticide lead is the biggest challenge for green pesticide discovery. Traditional ways for pesticide lead discovery is not always efficient enough, complementary techniques, combinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening (HTS), emerged in the early 1990s, generating hope for drug discovery. Unfortunately, many studies showed that most hit compounds were unsuitable for further optimization into potential drug candidates because their inherent properties (i.e., large size, low oral availability, or poor brain permeability) were poorer than expected. Fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD), which is based on identifying small potential chemical fragments, and then growing them or combining them to produce a lead with a higher affinity, has recently been rapidly developed as a new trend for the discovery of pesticide or drug lead.
Professor Yang’s group has long been committed to pesticide design methodology research, PFVS (pharmacophore-linked fragment virtual screening) method developed by The Yang Group has been published in JACS (J. Am. Chem. Soc.2012,134, 11168-11176) and received widely attention, discovery of several pesticide candidates demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of this method. To make this method move simple and powerful, prof. Yang’s group have develop ACFIS software based on PFVS protocol which is protected by China Software Copyright. This new method show good accuracy and highly efficiency. Moreover, the world’s first web server for FBDD has been constructed based on ACFIS software. ACFIS server can offer FBDD service for researchers worldwide. ACFIS server has been visited by researchers from over 40 countries and has finished over 1000 jobs.
The work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21332004)
Links:
http://chemyang.ccnu.edu.cn/ccb/server/ACFIS/
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/05/04/nar.gkw393
