LAUSR

Abstract Tuberculosis, caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis ( M. tuberculosis ), is still responsible for a large number of fatal cases, especially in developing countries with alarming rates of incidence and prevalence worldwide. Mycobacterium tuberculosis has a remarkable ability to develop new resistance mechanisms to the conventional antimicrobials treatment. Because of this, there is an urgent need for novel bioactive compounds for its treatment. The dehydroquinate dehydratase II (DHQase II) is considered a key enzyme of shikimate pathway, and it can be used as a promising target for the design of new bioactive compounds with antibacterial action. The aim of this work was the construction of QSAR models to aid the design of new potential DHQase II inhibitors. For that purpose, various molecular modeling approaches, such as activity cliff, QSAR models and computer-aided ligand design were utilized. A predictive in silico 4D-QSAR model was built using a database comprising 86 inhibitors of DHQase II, and the model was used to predict the activity of the designed ligands. The obtained model proved to predict well the DHQase II inhibition for an external validation dataset ( $$ Q^{2}_{\text{ext}} $$ Q ext 2  = 0.72). Also, the Activity Cliff analysis shed light on important structural features applied to the ligand design. Graphic abstract