scholarly journals Platforms for High-Throughput Screening and Force Measurements on Fungi and Oomycetes

Micromachines ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 639
Author(s):  
Yiling Sun ◽  
Ayelen Tayagui ◽  
Sarah Sale ◽  
Debolina Sarkar ◽  
Volker Nock ◽  
...  

Pathogenic fungi and oomycetes give rise to a significant number of animal and plant diseases. While the spread of these pathogenic microorganisms is increasing globally, emerging resistance to antifungal drugs is making associated diseases more difficult to treat. High-throughput screening (HTS) and new developments in lab-on-a-chip (LOC) platforms promise to aid the discovery of urgently required new control strategies and anti-fungal/oomycete drugs. In this review, we summarize existing HTS and emergent LOC approaches in the context of infection strategies and invasive growth exhibited by these microorganisms. To aid this, we introduce key biological aspects and review existing HTS platforms based on both conventional and LOC techniques. We then provide an in-depth discussion of more specialized LOC platforms for force measurements on hyphae and to study electro- and chemotaxis in spores, approaches which have the potential to aid the discovery of alternative drug targets on future HTS platforms. Finally, we conclude with a brief discussion of the technical developments required to improve the uptake of these platforms into the general laboratory environment.

2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (8) ◽  
pp. 869-877 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan I. Mackie ◽  
David L. Roman

In this study, the authors used AlphaScreen technology to develop a high-throughput screening method for interrogating small-molecule libraries for inhibitors of the Gαo–RGS17 interaction. RGS17 is implicated in the growth, proliferation, metastasis, and the migration of prostate and lung cancers. RGS17 is upregulated in lung and prostate tumors up to a 13-fold increase over patient-matched normal tissues. Studies show RGS17 knockdown inhibits colony formation and decreases tumorigenesis in nude mice. The screen in this study uses a measurement of the Gαo–RGS17 protein–protein interaction, with an excellent Z score exceeding 0.73, a signal-to-noise ratio >70, and a screening time of 1100 compounds per hour. The authors screened the NCI Diversity Set II and determined 35 initial hits, of which 16 were confirmed after screening against controls. The 16 compounds exhibited IC50 <10 µM in dose–response experiments. Four exhibited IC50 values <6 µM while inhibiting the Gαo–RGS17 interaction >50% when compared to a biotinylated glutathione-S-transferase control. This report describes the first high-throughput screen for RGS17 inhibitors, as well as a novel paradigm adaptable to many other RGS proteins, which are emerging as attractive drug targets for modulating G-protein-coupled receptor signaling.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivia W. Lee ◽  
Shelley Austin ◽  
Madison Gamma ◽  
Dorian M. Cheff ◽  
Tobie D. Lee ◽  
...  

Cell-based phenotypic screening is a commonly used approach to discover biological pathways, novel drug targets, chemical probes, and high-quality hit-to-lead molecules. Many hits identified from high-throughput screening campaigns are ruled out through a series of follow-up potency, selectivity/specificity, and cytotoxicity assays. Prioritization of molecules with little or no cytotoxicity for downstream evaluation can influence the future direction of projects, so cytotoxicity profiling of screening libraries at an early stage is essential for increasing the likelihood of candidate success. In this study, we assessed the cell-based cytotoxicity of nearly 10,000 compounds in the National Institutes of Health, National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences annotated libraries and more than 100,000 compounds in a diversity library against four normal cell lines (HEK 293, NIH 3T3, CRL-7250, and HaCat) and one cancer cell line (KB 3-1, a HeLa subline). This large-scale library profiling was analyzed for overall screening outcomes, hit rates, pan-activity, and selectivity. For the annotated library, we also examined the primary targets and mechanistic pathways regularly associated with cell death. To our knowledge, this is the first study to use high-throughput screening to profile a large screening collection (>100,000 compounds) for cytotoxicity in both normal and cancer cell lines. The results generated here constitute a valuable resource for the scientific community and provide insight into the extent of cytotoxic compounds in screening libraries, allowing for the identification and avoidance of compounds with cytotoxicity during high-throughput screening campaigns.


2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 3362-3377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vinay Randhawa ◽  
Anil Kumar Singh ◽  
Vishal Acharya

Network-based and cheminformatics approaches identify novel lead molecules forCXCR4, a key gene prioritized in oral cancer.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. e1006168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mart Toots ◽  
Mart Ustav ◽  
Andres Männik ◽  
Karl Mumm ◽  
Kaido Tämm ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivia W. Lee ◽  
Shelley Austin ◽  
Madison Gamma ◽  
Dorian M. Cheff ◽  
Tobie D. Lee ◽  
...  

AbstractCell-based phenotypic screening is a commonly used approach to discover biological pathways, novel drug targets, chemical probes and high-quality hit-to-lead molecules. Many hits identified from high-throughput screening campaigns are ruled out through a series of follow-up potency, selectivity/specificity, and cytotoxicity assays. Prioritization of molecules with little or no cytotoxicity for downstream evaluation can influence the future direction of projects, so cytotoxicity profiling of screening libraries at an early stage is essential for increasing the likelihood of candidate success. In this study, we assessed cell-based cytotoxicity of nearly 10,000 compounds in NCATS annotated libraries, and over 100,000 compounds in a diversity library, against four ‘normal’ cell lines (HEK 293, NIH 3T3, CRL-7250 and HaCat) and one cancer cell line (KB 3-1, a HeLa subline). This large-scale library profiling was analyzed for overall screening outcomes, hit rates, pan-activity and selectivity. For the annotated library, we also examined the primary targets and mechanistic pathways regularly associated with cell death. To our knowledge, this is the first study to use high-throughput screening to profile a large screening collection (>100,000 compounds) for cytotoxicity in both normal and cancer cell lines. The results generated here constitutes a valuable resource for the scientific community and provides insight on the extent of cytotoxic compounds in screening libraries, identifying and avoiding compounds with cytotoxicity during high-throughput screening campaigns.


mSphere ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah R. Beattie ◽  
Damian J. Krysan

Fungal infections caused by molds have the highest mortality rates of human fungal infections. These devastating infections are hard to treat and available antifungal drugs are often not effective.


2003 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 634-647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Brideau ◽  
Bert Gunter ◽  
Bill Pikounis ◽  
Andy Liaw

High-throughput screening (HTS) plays a central role in modern drug discovery, allowing the rapid screening of large compound collections against a variety of putative drug targets. HTS is an industrial-scale process, relying on sophisticated auto mation, control, and state-of-the art detection technologies to organize, test, and measure hundreds of thousands to millions of compounds in nano-to microliter volumes. Despite this high technology, hit selection for HTS is still typically done using simple data analysis and basic statistical methods. The authors discuss in this article some shortcomings of these methods and present alternatives based on modern methods of statistical data analysis. Most important, they describe and show numerous real examples from the biologist-friendly Stat Server® HTS application (SHS), a custom-developed software tool built on the commercially available S-PLUS® and StatServer® statistical analysis and server software. This system remotely processes HTS data using powerful and sophisticated statistical methodology but insulates users from the technical details by outputting results in a variety of readily interpretable graphs and tables.


2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (8) ◽  
pp. 1040-1051 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Taylor ◽  
Simon Woodcock

For more than a decade, RNA interference (RNAi) has brought about an entirely new approach to functional genomics screening. Enabling high-throughput loss-of-function (LOF) screens against the human genome, identifying new drug targets, and significantly advancing experimental biology, RNAi is a fast, flexible technology that is compatible with existing high-throughput systems and processes; however, the recent advent of clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-Cas, a powerful new precise genome-editing (PGE) technology, has opened up vast possibilities for functional genomics. CRISPR-Cas is novel in its simplicity: one piece of easily engineered guide RNA (gRNA) is used to target a gene sequence, and Cas9 expression is required in the cells. The targeted double-strand break introduced by the gRNA–Cas9 complex is highly effective at removing gene expression compared to RNAi. Together with the reduced cost and complexity of CRISPR-Cas, there is the realistic opportunity to use PGE to screen for phenotypic effects in a total gene knockout background. This review summarizes the exciting development of CRISPR-Cas as a high-throughput screening tool, comparing its future potential to that of well-established RNAi screening techniques, and highlighting future challenges and opportunities within these disciplines. We conclude that the two technologies actually complement rather than compete with each other, enabling greater understanding of the genome in relation to drug discovery.


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