Engineering protein fragments via evolutionary and protein-protein interaction algorithms: de novo design of peptide inhibitors for F O F 1 -ATP synthase

Enzyme subunit interfaces have remarkable potential in drug design as both target and scaffold for their own inhibitors. We show an evolution-driven strategy for the de novo design of peptide inhibitors targeting interfaces of the Escherichia coli FoF1-ATP synthase as a case study. The evolutionary algorithm ROSE was applied to generate diversity-oriented peptide libraries by engineering peptide fragments from ATP synthase interfaces. The resulting peptides were scored with PPI-Detect, a sequence-based predictor of protein-protein interactions. Two selected peptides were confirmed by in vitro inhibition and binding tests. The proposed methodology can be widely applied to design peptides targeting relevant interfaces of enzymatic complexes.