Abstract

GPCRs are ubiquitous in most of the organs of the human body. These receptors were found to be the important targets to attenuate inflammation, cancer, cardiac dysfunction, diabetes, etc. The advanced technologies employed on GPCRs provided an opportunity to understand the physiological process of various diseases. Recently, GPCRs were viewed as viable therapeutic targets to deliver safer and more efficacious drug. In the literature, several computational studies were reported to describe the biological mechanism, function and three-dimensional structure of GPCRs. These studies revealed the multiple conserved transmembrane domains of GPCRs which were connected by intra and extracellular loops. In this review, we provide an updated overview on the computational tools and methodologies which were conducted to explore the structural and mechanistic features of GPCRs. The study also demonstrates the most recent computeraided drug design approaches employed on GPCRs. This review provides the information that can be exploited toward the molecular understanding of GPCRs with an aim to design the novel ligands for GPCRs.

Keywords: Computer-aided drug design, GPCRs, molecular modeling.