Cystine-knot peptides have remarkable stability against protease degradation and are attractive scaffolds for peptide-based therapeutic and diagnostic agents. In this work, by studying the hydrolysis reaction of a cystine-knot inhibitor MCTI-A and its variants with ab initio QM/MM molecular dynamics simulations, we have elucidated an amide rotation hindrance mechanism for proteolysis resistance: The proteolysis of MCTI-A is retarded due to the higher free energy cost during the rotation of NH group around scissile peptide bond at the tetrahedral intermediate of acylation, and covalent constraint provided by disulfide bonds is the key factor to hinder this rotation. A nearly linear correlation has been revealed between free energy barriers of the peptide hydrolysis reaction and the amide rotation free energy changes at the protease–peptide Michaelis complex state. This suggests that amide rotation hindrance could be one useful feature to estimate peptide proteolysis stability.

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 rate of the covalent inhibition reaction, not the aspirin-binding step. The structural origin of this differential inhibition of the COX enzymes by aspirin has also been elucidated.