Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 1460, USA.
The development of low muM inhibitors of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis phosphatase PtpA is reported. The most potent of these inhibitors (K(i)=1.4+/-0.3 microM) was found to be selective when tested against a panel of human tyrosine and dual-specificity phosphatases (11-fold vs the highly homologous HCPtpA, and >70-fold vs all others tested). Modeling the inhibitor-PtpA complexes explained the structure-activity relationships observed in vitro and revealed further possibilities for compound development.