Combinatorial Chemistry & High Throughput Screening - Volume 6, Issue 8, 2003

The Caco-2 cell monolayer permeability assay has become a standard model of human intestinal absorption and transport. This paper reviews recent progress in increasing the throughput of Caco-2 cell monolayer assays and in expanding the scope of this assay to include modeling intestinal drug metabolism. The state-of-the-art in Caco-2 cell monolayer permeability assays combines multi-well plates fitted with semipermeable inserts on which Caco-2 cells have been cultured with liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) or LC-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS-MS) for the quantitative analysis of test compounds and the identification of their intestinal metabolites. After reviewing the progress in increasing the throughput of Caco-2 cell monolayer assays for both modeling human intestinal permeability or transport and the metabolism of xenobiotic compounds, we demonstrate the application of LC-MS and LC-MS-MS to the measurement of resveratrol permeability and metabolism in the Caco-2 model. trans-Resveratrol (trans-3,5,4'- trihydroxystilbene) is a polyphenolic compound occurring in grapes, peanuts and other food sources, that is under investigation as a cancer chemoprevention agent. The apparent permeability coefficient for apical (AP) to basolateral (BL) movement of resveratrol was 2.0 × 10 -5cm/sec. Resveratrol was not a substrate for Pglycoprotein or the multi-drug resistance associated proteins (MRP). No phase I metabolites were observed, but the phase II conjugates resveratrol-3-glucuronide and resveratrol-3-sulfate was identified based on LC-MS and LC-MS-MS analysis and comparison with synthetic standards. Although these data indicate that resveratrol diffuses rapidly across the intestinal epithelium, extensive phase II metabolism during absorption might reduce resveratrol bioavailability.

Cytokines play important roles in normal cell functions and changes in cytokines have been implicated in many diseases. Recent efforts have focused on developing cytokine antibody arrays. These arrays allow investigators to simultaneously detect multiple cytokines in qualitative and quantitative ways. Cytokine antibody array systems feature high sensitivity, specificity and throughput. This novel technology opens up an expanding spectrum of applications in drug discovery, including target discovery, target validation, screening for lead compounds, compound optimization and clinical trials.

The post-genomic era is revolutionizing the drug discovery process. The new challenges in the identification of therapeutic targets require efficient technological tools in order to be properly addressed. Label-free detection systems use proteins or ligands coupled to materials of which the physical properties are measurably modified upon specific interactions. Among the label-free systems currently available, the use of metal nanocolloids offers enhanced throughput and flexibility for real-time biomolecular recognition monitoring at a reasonable cost.

Histamine is a biogenic amine synthesized by the enzymatic decarboxylation of histidine. Implication of histamine in allergy is well described but histamine is also found in some specific neurones, functions as a neurotransmitter and regulates sleep/wake cycles, hormonal secretion, cardiovascular control and thermo-regulation. We have developed a TR-FRET histamine assay, based on the competition between sample histamine and allophycocyanine (XL665) labelled histamine for binding to a Europium cryptate (EuK) labelled antibody. As histamine is a small monoamine molecule, high affinity antibodies have been raised against carrier protein conjugated histamine. Therefore, sample histamine needs to be derivatized in the same way as the conjugated histamine, so that the antibody will have a similar affinity for both molecules. This acylation step is performed directly in wells and does not need to be done in separate vials, making handling easier for large numbers of samples. The incubation takes place at room temperature for 3 hours. The assay covers a measurement range of 1.56 to 400 nM and shows an analytical sensitivity of 1.3nM. We have shown that miniaturization of sample and reagents volumes down to 20μl does not alter these performances. This histamine release assay provides a particularly well adapted procedure for HTS and secondary screening compared to current heterogeneous methods.

Based on the classifications of the four nucleic acid bases, He and Wang reduced a DNA sequence to three binary sequences, which are called the characteristic sequences (J. Chem. Inf. Comput. Sci. 42 (2002) 1080). In this paper, we associate each characteristic sequence with a bL / bL matrix by giving a 2-D ‘two horizontal lines’ graphical representation, and thus obtain a 3-component vector with entries being the sums of the maximal and minimal eigenvalues of the bL / bL matrices. The introduced vector results in more simple characterizations and comparisons among the coding sequences of exon 1 of beta-globin gene of eleven different species.

The first important hypothesis in the prediction of properties of synthesized molecules is the structural hypothesis. In the study of drug–receptor interactions, the case where the three-dimensional structure of the receptor is known allows the application of molecular simulation and energy calculations to estimate the binding affinity for a proposed series of compounds. The chemical topological hypothesis permits the description of molecular structures without using concepts such as force or energy. These notions would not be as dominant as supposed since they should be able to be deduced from topology. Although topological descriptors are able to describe specific physicochemical properties, there is no any mechanistic interpretation for topological descriptors, but they can be considered as essential magnitudes, able to describe molecular structure as an alternative and independent approach, since they allow an algebraic description of the structure itself. The hypothesis is based on the ability of topological descriptors for the prediction of virtually any kind of structure-related macroscopic property, and to design directly new compounds showing predetermined properties. It is possible to design new lead drugs ignoring the explicit mechanism of action, but only by topological similarity with other active compounds. This is a basic difference with all the conventional methods based on the use of physical variables, which need to know the specific drug–receptor interaction. The electrotopological hypothesis may be considered a synthesis of both previous hypotheses. Finally, the electronic structure hypothesis is formulated.

In the present study three thermoanalytical methods: differential thermal analysis (DTA), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), and derivative thermogravimetric analysis (DTG) were used to investigate the thermal behavior of medicinal plant raw materials. In order to describe DTA curve, designation of the onset Ti, and peak Tp, temperatures was required. In TGA the mass losses Δm, and in DTG the temperature range of peak ΔT, peak temperature Tp, and peak height h, were recorded. All parameters were read for three stages of the thermal decomposition of plant samples which resulted in obtaining eighteen thermal variables for each sample. Some similarities in the course of thermal decomposition of the same plant organs were recognized, but complexity of the obtained data made it very difficult to determine if they could differentiate between medicinal plant materials and which of them encode the most valuable information about the studied herbals. In order to confirm the existence of any relations between the chemical composition of medicinal plants and their thermal decomposition and to find out which thermoanalytical variables or decomposition stages can be considered as the most significant in terms of their evaluation, it was decided to apply fully connected feedforward artificial neural networks (ANN). Two different training algorithms were used to address the problem: back-propagation of error and conjugate gradient descent. To verify the results two-dimensional (2-D) Kohonen self-organizing feature maps (SOFMs) were employed. Two alternative datasets of thirteen key variables discriminating plant samples have been proposed.