Key result
Omecamtiv mecarbil alters human cardiac myosin dynamics by increasing coupling of the converter and lever arm subdomains and rewiring the network of dynamic correlations.
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Molecular dynamics simulations reveal that omecamtiv mecarbil alters cardiac myosin dynamics by increasing subdomain coupling and rewiring dynamic correlations, providing a structural basis for its mechanism of action.
New promising avenues for the pharmacological treatment of skeletal and heart muscle diseases rely on direct sarcomeric modulators, which are molecules that can directly bind to sarcomeric proteins and either inhibit or enhance their activity. A recent breakthrough has been the discovery of the myosin activator omecamtiv mecarbil (OM), which has been shown to increase the power output of the cardiac muscle and is currently in clinical trials for the treatment of heart failure. While the overall effect of OM on the mechano-chemical cycle of myosin is to increase the fraction of myosin molecules in the sarcomere that are strongly bound to actin, the molecular basis of its action is still not completely clear. We present here a Molecular Dynamics study of the motor domain of human cardiac myosin bound to OM, where the effects of the drug on the dynamical properties of the protein are investigated for the first time with atomistic resolution. We found that OM has a double effect on myosin dynamics, inducing a) an increased coupling of the motions of the converter and lever arm subdomains to the rest of the protein and b) a rewiring of the network of dynamic correlations, which produces preferential communication pathways between the OM binding site and distant functional regions. The location of the residues responsible for these effects suggests possible strategies for the future development of improved drugs and the targeting of specific cardiomyopathy-related mutations.
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Hashem et al. (2017) studied this question. Omecamtiv mecarbil was evaluated on Myosin dynamics (coupling of motions and network of dynamic correlations). Omecamtiv mecarbil alters human cardiac myosin dynamics by increasing coupling of the converter and lever arm subdomains and rewiring the network of dynamic correlations.
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