Combinatorial Chemistry & High Throughput Screening - Volume 10, Issue 8, 2007

The availability of a fully sequenced genome is an enticing biological resource - sufficiently enticing, in fact, to spur the establishment of well over 300 eukaryotic genome-sequencing projects at this time. The investment of labor and resources in these projects is obviously sizable, and the expected scientific gain from these projects is equally sizable. In truth, the realistic advancement in biological knowledge resulting from Read More

The budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is well recognized as a preferred eukaryote for the development of genomic technologies and approaches. Accordingly, a sizeable complement of genomic resources has been developed in yeast, and this genomic foundation is now informing a wide variety of disciplines. In particular, yeast genomic methodologies are gaining an expanding foothold in drug development studies, Read More

Stem cell-based technologies have the potential to help cure a number of cell degenerative diseases. Combinatorial and high throughput screening techniques could provide tools to control and manipulate the self-renewal and differentiation of stem cells. This review chronicles historic and recent progress in the stem cell field involving both pluripotent and multipotent cells, and it highlights relevant cellular signal transductio Read More

The clinical success of the Bcr-Abl tyrosine kinase inhibitor Gleevec® and the recent clinical approval of a number of small molecule drugs that target protein kinases have intensified the search for novel protein kinase inhibitors. Since most small molecule kinase inhibitors target the highly conserved ATP-binding pocket of this enzyme family, the target selectivity of these molecules is a major concern. Due to the large size o Read More

Protein-protein interactions have become attractive drug targets and recent studies suggest that these interfaces may be amenable to inhibition by small molecules. However, blocking specific interactions may not be the only way of manipulating the extensive network of interacting proteins. Recently, several approaches have emerged for promoting these interactions rather than inhibiting them. Typically, these strategies em Read More

The recent success of the human genome project and the continued accomplishment in obtaining DNA sequences for a vast array of organisms is providing an unprecedented wealth of information. Nevertheless, an abundance of the proteome contains hypothetical proteins or proteins of unknown function, where high throughput approaches for genome- wide functional annotation (functional genomics) has evolved as the Read More

In vitro selection can be used to generate functional nucleic acids such as aptamers and ribozymes that can recognize a variety of molecules with high affinity and specificity. Most often these recognition events are associated with structural alterations that can be converted into detectable signals. Several signaling aptamers and ribozymes constructed by both design and selection have been successfully utilized as sensitive Read More

Protein microarrays, an emerging class of proteomic technologies, are quickly becoming essential tools for large-scale and high throughput biochemistry and molecular biology. Recent progress has been made in all the key steps of protein microarray fabrication and application, such as the large-scale cloning of expression-ready prokaryotic and eukaryotic ORFs, high throughput protein purification, surface chemistry, pr Read More

Chemogenomics comprises a systematic relationship between targets and ligands that are used as target modulators in living systems such as cells or organisms. In recent years, data on small molecule-bioactivity relationships have become increasingly available, and consequently so have the number of approaches used to translate bioactivity data into knowledge. This review will focus on two aspects of chemogenomics. Firstly Read More

Dr. Anuj Kumar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and Research Assistant Professor in the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan. Dr. Kumar's research employs methods in functional genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics to investigate fundamental questions in eukaryotic cellular and molecular biology using the budding yeast Saccharomyce Read More