Aspirin, one of the oldest and most common anti-inflammatory agents, has recently been shown to reduce cancer risks. The principal pharmacological effects of aspirin are known to arise from its covalent modification of cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) through acetylation of Ser530, but the detailed mechanism of its biochemical action and specificity remains to be elucidated. In this work, we have filled this gap by employing a state-of-the-art computational approach, Born–Oppenheimer molecular dynamics simulations with ab initio quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical potential and umbrella sampling. Our studies have characterized a substrate-assisted inhibition mechanism for aspirin acetylating COX: it proceeds in two successive stages with a metastable tetrahedral intermediate, in which the carboxyl group of aspirin serves as the general base. The computational results confirmed that aspirin would be 10–100 times more potent against COX-1 than against COX-2, and revealed that this inhibition specificity between the two COX isoforms can be attributed mainly to the difference in kinetics rateof the covalent inhibition reaction, not the aspirin-binding step.The structural origin of this differential inhibition of the COX enzymesby aspirin has also been elucidated.
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