Pharmacophore model of the quercetin binding site of the SIRT6 protein

SIRT6 is a histone deacetylase that has been proposed as a potential therapeutic target for metabolic disorders and the prevention of age-associated diseases. We have previously reported on the identification of quercetin and vitexin as SIRT6 inhibitors, and studied structurally related flavonoids including luteolin, kaempferol, apigenin and naringenin. It was determined that the SIRT6 protein remained active after immobilization and that a single frontal displacement could correctly predict the functional activity of the immobilized enzyme. The previous study generated a preliminary pharmacophore for the quercetin binding site on SIRT6, containing 3 hydrogen bond donors and one hydrogen bond acceptor. In this study, we have generated a refined pharmacophore with an additional twelve quercetin analogs. The resulting model had a positive linear behavior between the experimental elution time verses the fit values obtained from the model with a correlation coefficient of 0.8456.