ArticleMarine drugs2020
Structural Similarities between Some Common Fluorophores Used in Biology, Marketed Drugs, Endogenous Metabolites, and Natural Products.
Article in Marine drugs, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 24 citations in OpenAlex.
- Characterization of the Chaetae Autofluorescence in the Earthworm Eisenia foetida and their Role in Locomotion.Journal of fluorescence · 2025Article
- Rapid accumulation of fluorophores and fast kill identify drugs with bactericidal effects against Gram-negative bacteria.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2025Article
- A Direct Relationship Between 'Blood Stasis' and Fibrinaloid Microclots in Chronic, Inflammatory, and Vascular Diseases, and Some Traditional Natural Products Approaches to Treatment.Pharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Hydroxyacid Oxidase 1, a Glutamine Metabolism-Associated Protein, Predicts Poor Patient Outcome in Luminal Breast Cancer.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Article
- The Y-ome Conundrum: Insights into Uncharacterized Genes and Approaches for Functional Annotation.Molecular and cellular biochemistry · 2024Review
- Evidence for the Role of the Mitochondrial ABC Transporter MDL1 in the Uptake of Clozapine and Related Molecules into the YeastPharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Enhanced optical imaging and fluorescent labeling for visualizing drug molecules within living organisms.Acta pharmaceutica Sinica. B · 2024Review
- FMO-guided design of darunavir analogs as HIV-1 protease inhibitors.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Discovering Potential Compounds for Venous Disease Treatment through Virtual Screening and Network Pharmacology Approach.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Membrane transporters in cell physiology, cancer metabolism and drug response.Disease models & mechanisms · 2023Review
- Analysis of a Library ofAntibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- The Transporter-Mediated Cellular Uptake and Efflux of Pharmaceutical Drugs and Biotechnology Products: How and Why Phospholipid Bilayer Transport Is Negligible in Real Biomembranes.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- FragNet, a Contrastive Learning-Based Transformer Model for Clustering, Interpreting, Visualizing, and Navigating Chemical Space.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- A palette of fluorophores that are differentially accumulated by wild-type and mutant strains ofMicrobiology (Reading, England) · 2021Article
- An Overview of Cell-Based Assay Platforms for the Solute Carrier Family of Transporters.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2021Review
- Deep learning and generative methods in cheminformatics and chemical biology: navigating small molecule space intelligently.The Biochemical journal · 2020Review
- Structural Similarities between Some Common Fluorophores Used in Biology, Marketed Drugs, Endogenous Metabolites, and Natural Products.Marine drugs · 2020Article
- VAE-Sim: A Novel Molecular Similarity Measure Based on a Variational Autoencoder.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
It is known that at least some fluorophores can act as 'surrogate' substrates for solute carriers (SLCs) involved in pharmaceutical drug uptake, and this promiscuity is taken to reflect at least a certain structural similarity. As part of a comprehensive study seeking the 'natural' substrates of 'orphan' transporters that also serve to take up pharmaceutical drugs into cells, we have noted that many drugs bear structural similarities to natural products. A cursory inspection of common fluorophores indicates that they too are surprisingly 'drug-like', and they also enter at least some cells. Some are also known to be substrates of efflux transporters. Consequently, we sought to assess the structural similarity of common fluorophores to marketed drugs, endogenous mammalian metabolites, and natural products. We used a set of some 150 fluorophores along with standard fingerprinting methods and the Tanimoto similarity metric. Results: The great majority of fluorophores tested exhibited significant similarity (Tanimoto similarity > 0.75) to at least one drug, as judged via descriptor properties (especially their aromaticity, for identifiable reasons that we explain), by molecular fingerprints, by visual inspection, and via the "quantitative estimate of drug likeness" technique. It is concluded that this set of fluorophores does overlap with a significant part of both the drug space and natural products space. Consequently, fluorophores do indeed offer a much wider opportunity than had possibly been realised to be used as surrogate uptake molecules in the competitive or trans-stimulation assay of membrane transporter activities.
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