Antimicrobial Evaluation, Molecular Docking and ADME Properties of Indole Amide Derivatives

Background: Besides the viral infections, bacterial infections can cause serious and lifethreatening complications and drug resistance is an important problem to fight bacterial infections. Therefore, it is important to discover novel antimicrobial agents to fight such infections. Objective: Several indole containing antimicrobial drug development studies have been reported in literature that provided strong evidence for good antimicrobial activities against a variety of microorganisms. Taken into consideration from these findings, antimicrobial properties of previously synthesized 16 indole amide derivatives were evaluated by in vitro tests against 14 different microorganisms, and also molecular docking and in silico prediction studies were used to identify structure-activity relationship of compounds. Methods: Antimicrobial activity of compounds was determined by disc diffusion and tube dilution methods. Molecular docking of compounds was studied to determine the relationship between the structure of compounds with DNA gyrase interactions of microorganisms by using the version of Autodock vina 4.2.6. Mol inspiration and Swiss ADME prediction online software programs were also used to identify drug-like properties of compounds. Results: The results showed that some compounds exhibited quite pronounced antibacterial and antifungal activities compared to reference drugs. These results were also supported by molecular docking studies and in silico ADME calculations presented that all tested compounds obey Lipinski’s Rule of Five and are metabolized by CYP450 enzymes. Conclusion: It can be concluded that these results can be taken as a reference in the development of new indole-based antimicrobial agents.