scholarly journals High Throughput Screening of FDA-Approved Drug Library Reveals the Compounds that Promote IRF3-Mediated Pro-Apoptotic Pathway Inhibit Virus Replication

Viruses ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 442 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Glanz ◽  
Karan Chawla ◽  
Stephanie Fabry ◽  
Gayatri Subramanian ◽  
Julie Garcia ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Antiviral Activity ◽  
High Throughput ◽  
High Throughput Screening ◽  
Transcriptional Activity ◽  
Viral Infections ◽  
Antiviral Effect ◽  
Apoptotic Pathway ◽  
Antiviral Genes ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Infected Cells

Interferon (IFN) regulatory factor 3 (IRF3) is the key transcription factor for the induction of IFN and antiviral genes. The absence of antiviral genes in IRF3 deficiency leads to susceptibility to a wide range of viral infections. Previously, we uncovered a function for nontranscriptional IRF3 (nt-IRF3), RLR (RIG-I-like receptor)-induced IRF3-mediated pathway of apoptosis (RIPA), which triggers apoptotic killing of virus-infected cells. Using knock-in mice expressing a transcriptionally inactive, but RIPA-active, IRF3 mutant, we demonstrated the relative contribution of RIPA to host antiviral defense. Given that RIPA is a cellular antiviral pathway, we hypothesized that small molecules that promote RIPA in virus-infected cells would act as antiviral agents. To test this, we conducted a high throughput screen of a library of FDA-approved drugs to identify novel RIPA activators. Our screen identified doxorubicin as a potent RIPA-activating agent. In support of our hypothesis, doxorubicin inhibited the replication of vesicular stomatitis virus, a model rhabdovirus, and its antiviral activity depended on its ability to activate IRF3 in RIPA. Surprisingly, doxorubicin inhibited the transcriptional activity of IRF3. The antiviral activity of doxorubicin was expanded to flavivirus and herpesvirus that also activate IRF3. Mechanistically, doxorubicin promoted RIPA by activating the extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) signaling pathway. Finally, we validated these results using another RIPA-activating compound, pyrvinium pamoate, which showed a similar antiviral effect without affecting the transcriptional activity of IRF3. Therefore, we demonstrate that the RIPA branch of IRF3 can be targeted therapeutically to prevent virus infection.

scholarly journals A molecular toolbox for ADP-ribosyl binding proteins

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sven T Sowa ◽  
Albert Galera-Prat ◽  
Mirko M Maksimainen ◽  
Heli I Alanen ◽  
Sarah Wazir ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
High Throughput ◽  
High Throughput Screening ◽  
Viral Infections ◽  
Binding Assay ◽  
Fluorescent Proteins ◽  
Protein Fusion ◽  
E Coli ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Gi Protein ◽  
Protein Alpha Subunit

Proteins interacting with ADP-ribosyl groups are often involved in disease-related pathways or in viral infections, which makes them attractive targets for the development of inhibitors. Our goal was to develop a robust and accessible assay technology that is suitable for high-throughput screening and applicable to a wide range of proteins acting as either hydrolysing or non-hydrolysing binders of mono- and poly-ADP-ribosyl groups. As a foundation of our work, we developed a C-terminal protein fusion tag based on a Gi protein alpha subunit peptide (GAP), which allows for site-specific introduction of cysteine-linked mono- and poly-ADP-ribosyl groups as well as chemical ADP-ribosyl analogs. By fusion of the GAP-tag and ADP-ribosyl binders to fluorescent proteins, we were able to generate robust FRET signals and the interaction with 22 previously described ADP-ribosyl-binders was confirmed. To demonstrate the applicability of this binding assay for high-throughput screening, we utilized it to screen for inhibitors of the SARS-CoV-2 nsp3 macrodomain and identified the drug suramin as a moderate yet unspecific inhibitor of this protein. To complement the binding technology, we prepared high-affinity ADP-ribosyl binders fused to a nanoluciferase, which enabled simple blot-based detection of mono- and poly-ADP-ribosylated proteins. These tools can be expressed recombinantly in E. coli using commonly available agents and will help to investigate ADP-ribosylation systems and aid in drug discovery.

scholarly journals Asymmetric synthesis of host-directed inhibitors of myxoviruses

2013 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 197-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry W Moore ◽  
Kasinath Sana ◽  
Dan Yan ◽  
Pahk Thepchatri ◽  
John M Ndungu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Antiviral Activity ◽  
Asymmetric Synthesis ◽  
High Throughput ◽  
High Throughput Screening ◽  
Aqueous Solubility ◽  
Influenza Viruses ◽  
Lead Compound ◽  
Synthetic Strategy ◽  
Aqueous Solubilities ◽  
Nanomolar Range

High-throughput screening (HTS) previously identified benzimidazole 1 (JMN3-003) as a compound with broad antiviral activity against different influenza viruses and paramyxovirus strains. In pursuit of a lead compound from this series for development, we sought to increase both the potency and the aqueous solubility of 1. Lead optimization has achieved compounds with potent antiviral activity against a panel of myxovirus family members (EC50 values in the low nanomolar range) and much improved aqueous solubilities relative to that of 1. Additionally, we have devised a robust synthetic strategy for preparing 1 and congeners in an enantio-enriched fashion, which has allowed us to demonstrate that the (S)-enantiomers are generally 7- to 110-fold more potent than the corresponding (R)-isomers.

scholarly journals Directed Evolution of Aptamer Discovery Technologies

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Wu ◽  
Chelsea Gordon ◽  
John Shin ◽  
Michael Eisenstein ◽  
Hyongsok Tom Soh
Keyword(s):  
High Throughput ◽  
High Throughput Screening ◽  
Click Reaction ◽  
Clinical Diagnostics ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Affinity Reagents ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Target Binding ◽  
Modified Nucleobases ◽  
Parallel Fashion

Although antibodies are a powerful tool for molecular biology and clinical diagnostics, there are many emerging applications for which nucleic acid-based aptamers can be advantageous. However, generating high-quality aptamers with sufficient affinity and specificity for biomedical applications is a challenging feat for most research laboratories. In this Account, we describe four techniques developed in our lab to accelerate the discovery of high quality aptamer reagents that can achieve robust binding even for challenging molecular targets. The first method is particle display, in which we convert solution-phase aptamers into aptamer particles that can be screened via fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) to quantitatively isolate individual aptamer particles based on their affinity. This enables the efficient isolation of high-affinity aptamers in fewer selection rounds than conventional methods, thereby minimizing selection biases and reducing the emergence of artifacts in the final aptamer pool. We subsequently developed the multi-parametric particle display (MPPD) method, which employs two-color FACS to isolate aptamer particles based on both affinity and specificity, yielding aptamers that exhibit excellent target binding even in complex matrices like serum. The third method is a click chemistry-based particle display (click-PD) that enables the generation and high-throughput screening of non-nattural aptamers with a wide range of base modifications. We have shown that these base-modified aptamers can achieve robust affinity and specificity for targets that have proven challenging or inaccessible with natural nucleotide-based aptamer libraries. Lastly, we describe the non-natural aptamer array (N2A2) platform, in which a modified benchtop sequencing instrument is used to characterize base-modified aptamers in a massively parallel fashion, enabling the efficient identification of molecules with excellent affinity and specificity for their targets. This system first generates aptamer clusters on the flow-cell surface that incorporate alkyne-modified nucleobases, and then performs a click reaction to couple those nucleobases to an azide-modified chemical moiety. This yields a sequence-defined array of tens of millions of base-modified sequences, which can then be characterized in a high-throughput fashion. Collectively, we believe that these advancements are helping to make aptamer technology more accessible, efficient, and robust, thereby enabling the use of these affinity reagents for a wider range of molecular recognition and detection-based applications.

Rapid generation of Hybrid Biochemical/Mechanical Cues in Heterogeneous Droplets for High-Throughput Screening of Cellular Response

Lab on a Chip ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xing Zhao ◽  
Gaozhi Ou ◽  
Mengcheng Lei ◽  
Yang Zhang ◽  
Lina Li ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Signaling Pathways ◽  
High Throughput ◽  
High Throughput Screening ◽  
Cellular Response ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Rapid Generation ◽  
P Cells

Cells in native microenvironment are subjected to varying combinations of biochemical cues and mechanical cues in a wide range. Despite many signaling pathways have been found to be responsive for...

SoftBV – a software tool for screening the materials genome of inorganic fast ion conductors

2019 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haomin Chen ◽  
Lee Loong Wong ◽  
Stefan Adams
Keyword(s):  
Force Field ◽  
High Throughput ◽  
High Throughput Screening ◽  
Density Functional ◽  
Inorganic Compounds ◽  
Computational Cost ◽  
Lewis Base ◽  
Computational Screening ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Dft Simulations

The identification of materials for advanced energy-storage systems is still mostly based on experimental trial and error. Increasingly, computational tools are sought to accelerate materials discovery by computational predictions. Here are introduced a set of computationally inexpensive software tools that exploit the bond-valence-based empirical force field previously developed by the authors to enable high-throughput computational screening of experimental or simulated crystal-structure models of battery materials predicting a variety of properties of technological relevance, including a structure plausibility check, surface energies, an inventory of equilibrium and interstitial sites, the topology of ion-migration paths in between those sites, the respective migration barriers and the site-specific attempt frequencies. All of these can be predicted from CIF files of structure models at a minute fraction of the computational cost of density functional theory (DFT) simulations, and with the added advantage that all the relevant pathway segments are analysed instead of arbitrarily predetermined paths. The capabilities and limitations of the approach are evaluated for a wide range of ion-conducting solids. An integrated simple kinetic Monte Carlo simulation provides rough (but less reliable) predictions of the absolute conductivity at a given temperature. The automated adaptation of the force field to the composition and charge distribution in the simulated material allows for a high transferability of the force field within a wide range of Lewis acid–Lewis base-type ionic inorganic compounds as necessary for high-throughput screening. While the transferability and precision will not reach the same levels as in DFT simulations, the fact that the computational cost is several orders of magnitude lower allows the application of the approach not only to pre-screen databases of simple structure prototypes but also to structure models of complex disordered or amorphous phases, and provides a path to expand the analysis to charge transfer across interfaces that would be difficult to cover by ab initio methods.

scholarly journals High-Throughput Screening of Metal–organic Frameworks for Macroscale Heteroepitaxial Alignment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Tarzia ◽  
Masahide Takahashi ◽  
Paolo Falcaro ◽  
Aaron Thornton ◽  
Christian Doonan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
High Throughput ◽  
High Throughput Screening ◽  
Defect Formation ◽  
Metal Organic Frameworks ◽  
Rectangular Lattice ◽  
Copper Hydroxide ◽  
Computational Screening ◽  
Screening Algorithm ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Metal Organic

The ability to align porous metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) on substrate surfaces on a macroscopic scale is a vital step towards integrating MOFs into functional devices. But macroscale surface alignment of MOF crystals has only been demonstrated in a few cases. To accelerate the materials discovery process, we have developed a high-throughput computational screening algorithm to identify MOFs that are likely to undergo macroscale aligned heterepitaxial growth on a substrate. Screening of thousands of MOF structures by this process can be achieved in a few days on a desktop workstation. The algorithm filters MOFs based on surface chemical compatibility, lattice matching with the substrate, and interfacial bonding. Our method uses a simple new computationally efficient measure of the interfacial energy that considers both bond and defect formation at the interface. Furthermore, we show that this novel descriptor is a better predictor of aligned heteroepitaxial growth than other established interface descriptors, by testing our screening algorithm on a sample set of copper MOFs that have been grown heteroepitaxially on a copper hydroxide surface. Application of the screening process to several MOF databases reveals that the top candidates for aligned growth on copper hydroxide comprise mostly MOFs with rectangular lattice symmetry in the plane of the substrate. This result indicates a substrate-directing effect that could be exploited in targeted synthetic strategies. We also identify that MOFs likely to form aligned heterostructures have broad distributions of in-plane pore sizes and anisotropies. Accordingly, this suggests that aligned MOF thin films with a wide range of properties may be experimentally accessible.

scholarly journals High-Throughput Screening of Metal–organic Frameworks for Macroscale Heteroepitaxial Alignment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Tarzia ◽  
Masahide Takahashi ◽  
Paolo Falcaro ◽  
Aaron Thornton ◽  
Christian Doonan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
High Throughput ◽  
High Throughput Screening ◽  
Defect Formation ◽  
Metal Organic Frameworks ◽  
Rectangular Lattice ◽  
Copper Hydroxide ◽  
Computational Screening ◽  
Screening Algorithm ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Metal Organic

The ability to align porous metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) on substrate surfaces on a macroscopic scale is a vital step towards integrating MOFs into functional devices. But macroscale surface alignment of MOF crystals has only been demonstrated in a few cases. To accelerate the materials discovery process, we have developed a high-throughput computational screening algorithm to identify MOFs that are likely to undergo macroscale aligned heterepitaxial growth on a substrate. Screening of thousands of MOF structures by this process can be achieved in a few days on a desktop workstation. The algorithm filters MOFs based on surface chemical compatibility, lattice matching with the substrate, and interfacial bonding. Our method uses a simple new computationally efficient measure of the interfacial energy that considers both bond and defect formation at the interface. Furthermore, we show that this novel descriptor is a better predictor of aligned heteroepitaxial growth than other established interface descriptors, by testing our screening algorithm on a sample set of copper MOFs that have been grown heteroepitaxially on a copper hydroxide surface. Application of the screening process to several MOF databases reveals that the top candidates for aligned growth on copper hydroxide comprise mostly MOFs with rectangular lattice symmetry in the plane of the substrate. This result indicates a substrate-directing effect that could be exploited in targeted synthetic strategies. We also identify that MOFs likely to form aligned heterostructures have broad distributions of in-plane pore sizes and anisotropies. Accordingly, this suggests that aligned MOF thin films with a wide range of properties may be experimentally accessible.

scholarly journals Assessing the stability of Pd-exchanged sites in zeolites with the aid of a high throughput quantum chemistry workflow

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hassan Aljama ◽  
Martin Head-Gordon ◽  
Alexis Bell
Keyword(s):  
High Throughput ◽  
High Throughput Screening ◽  
Active Sites ◽  
Density Functional ◽  
Functional Materials ◽  
No Adsorption ◽  
Functional Theory ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Shed Light

Abstract Cation exchanged-zeolites are functional materials with a wide range of applications from catalysis to sorbents. They present a challenge for computational studies using density functional theory due to the numerous possible active sites. From Al configuration, to placement of extra framework cation(s), to potentially different oxidation states of the cation, accounting for all these possibilities is not trivial. To make the number of calculations more tractable, most studies focus on a few active sites. We attempt to go beyond these limitations by implementing a workflow for a high throughput screening, designed to systematize the problem and exhaustively search for feasible active sites. We use Pd-exchanged CHA and BEA to illustrate the approach. After conducting thousands of individual calculations, we identify the sites most favorable for the Pd cation and discuss the results in detail. The high throughput screening identifies many energetically favorable sites that are non-trivial. Lastly, we employ these results to examine NO adsorption in Pd-exchanged CHA, which is a promising passive NOx adsorbent (PNA) during the cold start of automobiles. The results shed light on critical active sites for NOx capture that were not previously studied.

scholarly journals Semi-automated high-throughput substrate screening assay for nucleoside kinases

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katja Hellendahl ◽  
Maryke Fehlau ◽  
Sebastian Hans ◽  
Peter Neubauer ◽  
Anke Kurreck
Keyword(s):  
High Throughput ◽  
Viral Infections ◽  
Screening Assay ◽  
Liquid Handling ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
High Throughput Assay ◽  
Liquid Handling Robot

Nucleoside kinases (NKs) are key enzymes involved in the in vivo phosphorylation of nucleoside analogues used as drugs to treat cancer or viral infections. Having different specificities, the characterization of NKs is essential for drug design and the production of nucleotide analogues in an in vitro enzymatic process. Therefore, a fast and reliable substrate screening assay for NKs is of great importance. Here, we report the validation of a well-known luciferase-based assay for the detection of NK activity in 96-well plate format. The assay was semi-automated using a liquid handling robot. A good linearity was demonstrated (r² >0.98) in the range of 0 to 500 µM ATP, and it was shown that also alternative phosphate donors like dATP or CTP were accepted by the luciferase. The developed high-throughput assay revealed comparable results to HPLC analysis. The assay was exemplary used for the comparison of the substrate spectra of four nucleoside kinases using 20 (8 natural and 12 modified) substrates. The screening results correlated well with literature data and, additionally, previously unknown substrates were identified for three of the NKs studied. Our results demonstrate that the developed semi-automated high-throughput assay is suitable to identify best performing NKs for a wide range of substrates.

Validation of a High-Throughput Calcium Mobilization Assay for the Human Trace Amine-Associated Receptor 1

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-150
Author(s):  
Ann M. Decker ◽  
Kelly M. Mathews ◽  
Bruce E. Blough ◽  
Brian P. Gilmour
Keyword(s):  
High Throughput ◽  
High Throughput Screening ◽  
Therapeutic Potential ◽  
Calcium Mobilization ◽  
Hit Rate ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Trace Amine ◽  
The Central Nervous System ◽  
Calcium Mobilization Assay

The human trace amine-associated receptor 1 (hTAAR1) is a G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) that is widely expressed in monoaminergic nuclei in the central nervous system and has therapeutic potential for multiple diseases, including drug addiction and schizophrenia. Thus, identification of novel hTAAR1 ligands is critical to advancing our knowledge of hTAAR1 function and to the development of therapeutics for a wide range of diseases. Herein we describe the development of a robust, 3-addition high-throughput screening (HTS) calcium mobilization assay using stable CHO-Gαq16-hTAAR1 cells, which functionally couple hTAAR1 to the promiscuous Gαq16 protein and thus allow signal transduction to occur through mobilization of internal calcium. Our previously established 96-well hTAAR1 assay was first miniaturized to the 384-well format and optimized to provide an assay with a Z′ factor of 0.84, which is indicative of a robust HTS assay. Using the 3-addition protocol, 22,000 compounds were screened and yielded a ~1% agonist hit rate and a ~0.2% antagonist hit rate. Of the antagonist hits, two confirmed hits are the most potent hTAAR1 antagonists identified to date (IC50 = 206 and 281 nM). While scientists have been studying hTAAR1 for years, the lack of suitable hTAAR1 antagonists has been a major roadblock for studying the basic pharmacology of hTAAR1. Thus, these new ligands will serve as valuable tools to study hTAAR1-mediated signaling mechanisms, therapeutic potential, and in vivo functions.

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