Anti-HIV potential of diarylpyrimidine derivatives as non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors: design, synthesis, docking, TOPKAT analysis and molecular dynamics simulations.

In view of the low toxicity of NNRTIs in comparison to NRTIs, a new series of diarylpyrimidine derivatives has been designed as NNRTIs against HIV-1. In silico studies using DS 3.0 software have shown that these compounds behaved as NNRTIs while interacting at the allosteric site of HIV-RT. The designed compounds have shown promising docking results, which revealed that all compounds formed hydrogen bonds with Lys101, Lys103, Tyr181, Tyr318 and π- interactions with Tyr181, Tyr188, Phe227 and Trp229 amino acid residues located in the non-nucleoside inhibitor binding pocket (NNIBP) of HIV-RT protein. The intended molecules have shown high binding affinity with HIV-1 RT, analogous to standard drug molecule-etravirine. TOPKAT results confirmed that the designed compounds were found to be less toxic than the reference drug. Further, employing molecular dynamics simulations, the complexes of the best screened compound 6 and etravirine with the HIV-1 RT protein were analyzed by calculating the RMSD, RMSF, Rg, number of hydrogen bonds, principal components of the coordinates, molecular mechanics-Poisson-Boltzmann surface area-based binding free energy and their decomposition for different interactions. The analysis demonstrated the higher stability of compound 6 than the standard drug etravirine with HIV-1 RT. The interactions like hydrogen-bonding, van-der-Waals, electrostatic and the solvent accessible surface energy have favorable contributions to the complex stability. Thus, the shortlisted designed compound has great promise as a potential inhibitor against HIV-1 RT.