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Mammalian lipoxygenases play a role in normal cell development and differentiation but they have also been implicated in the pathogenesis of cardiovascular, hyperproliferative and neurodegenerative diseases. As lipid peroxidizing enzymes they are involved in the regulation of cellular redox homeostasis since they produce lipid hydroperoxides, which serve as an efficient source for free radicals. There are various epidemiological correlation studies relating naturally occurring variations in the six human lipoxygenase genes (SNPs or rare mutations) to the frequency for various diseases in these individuals, but for most of the described variations no functional data are available. Employing a combined bioinformatical and enzymological strategy, which included structural modeling and experimental site-directed mutagenesis, we systematically explored the structural and functional consequences of non-synonymous genetic variations in four different human lipoxygenase genes (ALOX5, ALOX12, ALOX15, and ALOX15B) that have been identified in the human 1000 genome project. Due to a lack of a functional expression system we resigned to analyze the functionality of genetic variations in the hALOX12B and hALOXE3 gene. We found that most of the frequent non-synonymous coding SNPs are located at the enzyme surface and hardly alter the enzyme functionality. In contrast, genetic variations which affect functional important amino acid residues or lead to truncated enzyme variations (nonsense mutations) are usually rare with a global allele frequency

In this study we introduce a rescoring method to improve the accuracy of docking programs against mPGES-1. The rescoring method developed is a result of extensive computational study in which different scoring functions and molecular descriptors were combined to develop consensus and rescoring methods. 127 mPGES-1 inhibitors were collected from literature and were segregated into training and external test sets. Docking of the 27 training set compounds was carried out using default settings in AutoDock Vina, AutoDock, DOCK6 and GOLD programs. The programs showed low to moderate correlation with the experimental activities. In order to introduce the contributions of desolvation penalty and conformation energy of the inhibitors various molecular descriptors were calculated. Later, rescoring method was developed as empirical sum of normalised values of docking scores, LogP and Nrotb. The results clearly indicated that LogP and Nrotb recuperate the predictions of these docking programs. Further the efficiency of the rescoring method was validated using 100 test set compounds. The accurate prediction of binding affinities for analogues of the same compounds is a major challenge for many of the existing docking programs; in the present study the high correlation obtained for experimental and predicted pIC50 values for the test set compounds validates the efficiency of the scoring method.