TY - JOUR A1 - Dietschreit, Johannes C. B. A1 - Wagner, Annika A1 - Le, T. Anh A1 - Klein, Philipp A1 - Schindelin, Hermann A1 - Opatz, Till A1 - Engels, Bernd A1 - Hellmich, Ute A. A1 - Ochsenfeld, Christian T1 - Predicting \(^{19}\)F NMR Chemical Shifts: A Combined Computational and Experimental Study of a Trypanosomal Oxidoreductase–Inhibitor Complex JF - Angewandte Chemie International Edition N2 - The absence of fluorine from most biomolecules renders it an excellent probe for NMR spectroscopy to monitor inhibitor–protein interactions. However, predicting the binding mode of a fluorinated ligand from a chemical shift (or vice versa) has been challenging due to the high electron density of the fluorine atom. Nonetheless, reliable \(^{19}\)F chemical‐shift predictions to deduce ligand‐binding modes hold great potential for in silico drug design. Herein, we present a systematic QM/MM study to predict the \(^{19}\)F NMR chemical shifts of a covalently bound fluorinated inhibitor to the essential oxidoreductase tryparedoxin (Tpx) from African trypanosomes, the causative agent of African sleeping sickness. We include many protein–inhibitor conformations as well as monomeric and dimeric inhibitor–protein complexes, thus rendering it the largest computational study on chemical shifts of \(^{19}\)F nuclei in a biological context to date. Our predicted shifts agree well with those obtained experimentally and pave the way for future work in this area. KW - African sleeping sickness KW - covalent inhibitors KW - NMR spectroscopy KW - quantum chemistry KW - structural biology Y1 - 2020 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-214879 VL - 59 IS - 31 SP - 12669 EP - 12673 ER -