A high-throughput screening protocol has been developed for Mycobacterium tuberculosis glutamine synthetase by quantitative estimation of inorganic phosphate. The Km values determined at pH 6.8 are 22 mM for L-glutamic acid, 0.75 mM for NH4Cl, 3.25 mM for MgCl2, and 2.5 mM for adenosine triphosphate. The Km value for glutamine is affected significantly by the increase in pH of assay buffer. At the saturating level of the substrate, the enzyme activity at pH 6.8 and 25° C is found to be linear up to 3 h. The reduction of enzyme activity is negligible even in presence of 10% DMSO. The Z′ factor and signal-to-noise ratio are found to be 0.75 and 6.18, respectively, when the enzyme is used at 62.5 μg/ml concentration. The IC50 values obtained at pH 6.8 for both L-methionine S-sulfoximine and DL-phosphothriacin are 500 μM and 30 μM, respectively, which is lowest compared to the values obtained at other pH levels. The Beckman Coulter high-throughput screening platform was found to take 5 h 9 min to complete the screening of 60 plates. For each assay plate, a replica plate is used to normalize the data. Screening of 1164 natural product fractions/extracts and synthetic molecules from an in-house library was able to identify 12 samples as confirmed hits. Altogether, the validation data from screening of a small set of an in-house library coupled with Z′ and signal-to-noise values indicate that the protocol is robust for high-throughput screening of a diverse chemical library.
High-throughput computational-experimental screening protocol for the discovery of bimetallic catalysts
