Development of novel chromones as antioxidant COX2 inhibitors: in vitro, QSAR, DFT, molecular docking, and molecular dynamics studies

The chromone derivatives are playing a prominent role in many plant cycles, for instance, the regulation of growth, stimulation of oxygen uptake in plants, and essential food constituents with valuable pro-health properties. Determination of the antioxidant activity of these compounds is an interesting approach to drug design and development. The antioxidant activity of the novel fifteen chromone compounds was estimated by using a spectrophotometric Dichloro-5,6-dicyano 1,4-benzoquinone (DDQ) assay method and the mechanism of antioxidant activity was discussed based on the Density functional theory (DFT) calculations. The compounds showed significant antioxidant activity which was correlated to their molecular structure by considering various molecular descriptors. Further, by using regression analysis QSAR-modeled equation was proposed and it has shown a high correlation coefficient value (0.946. We perform molecular docking and molecular dynamics simulations against the cyclooxygenase (COX2) enzyme to investigate the molecule’s anti-inflammatory activity and stability of protein-ligand complexes. Molecular docking and dynamics simulations revealed the compounds B3 and B8 were interacting with essential residues TYR385, HIS386, ASN382, TRP387, and HIS388 in the binding site that were crucial for optimizing heme and the resultant peroxidase and cyclooxygenase activities. The root mean square displacement and root mean square fluctuation plots revealed the stability of the B3-COX2 and B8-COX2 complexes. Based on our results, B3 and B8 compounds are considered as best antioxidants as well as COX2 inhibitors. Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma