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PIM-1 is a serine-threonine kinase mainly expressed in tissues like the Thymus, spleen, bone marrow, and liver. Overexpression of PIM kinases occurs in various types of human tumours, such as lymphomas, prostate cancer, and oral cancer. As a result, the design of drugs to inhibit PIM-1 in cancerous cells has attracted much attention in recent years. This study aimed to design the alternative inhibitors for PIM-1 kinase, which are based on carbohydrates and amino acids and are expected to be non-toxic with the same chemotherapeutic effects as the traditional known anticancer drugs. The combinatorial use of quantum mechanics (QM) and molecular dynamic simulation (MD) has enabled us to precisely predict the inhibition of PIM-1 kinase by the novel designed drugs and compare them with the recently synthesized chemotherapeutic drugs such as DBC (Table 1). All designed structures were optimized at the B3LYP/6-311++G(d,p) level. The designed structure UNK4 (Table 1) was the most similar structure to DBC in terms of volumes, areas, and electrostatic potential map to DBC. The results obtained in this research represented that UNK4, with the building blocks of amino acid and cyclic carbohydrates could be considered an alternative anticancer drug for DBC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Density functional theory (DFT) was used to investigate the acidity of the various silica alkyl sulfonic acids. In this regard, cluster models with various alkyl spacer lengths were selected to mimic the surface of silica gel. The effects of distance from the surface and the role of hydrogen bond (H–bond) on the ΔHacidityvalues of these catalysts were investigated. DFT calculations revealed that a notable gap of ΔHacidityvalues exists between the structures considering lateral hydrogen bonding with the surface of the silicaHB structureand the structures with omitted surface interactions (non-HB structures). Natural bonding orbital (NBO) and quantum theory of atoms in molecules (QTAIM) analyses were carried out to obtain detailed information about the nature of the H–bonds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]