Official Project Description
Approximately 40 percent of drugs approved or currently in clinical testing contain halogens (F, Cl, Br, or I) as pharmaceutically active ligand substituents.
This makes the halogenation of chemical scaffolds an issue of particular interest to medicinal chemists when attempting to synthesize potential drug candidates.
Many of the current methods for halogenation are difficult to control the regioselectivity or produce toxic byproducts during the reaction.
Due to these issues; halogenases, a class of enzymes that catalyze highly regioselective halogenation of various molecules in nature, have been studied as a means to improve existing halogenation methods with less toxic byproducts and higher regioselectivity of reaction.
By utilizing Relative Binding Free Energy calculations (RBFE) across a number of common organic molecule scaffolds, our goal is to better predict the probability and site of halogenation for various common chemical scaffolds across a number of halogenases.