No abstract

A general chemical strategy has been developed whereby antibody combining sites can be selectively derivatized with natural or synthetic molecules, such as catalytic groups, drugs, metals, or reporter molecules. Cleavable affinity labels were used to selectively introduce a thiol into the combining site of the immunoglobulin A MOPC 315. This thiol acted both as a nucleophile to accelerate ester thiolysis 60,000-fold and as a handle for selectively derivatizing the antibody with additional functional groups. For example, derivatization of the antibody with a fluorophore made possible a direct spectroscopic assay of antibody-ligand complexation. This chemistry should not only extend our ability to exploit antibody specificity in chemical catalysis, diagnostics, and therapeutics, but may also prove generally applicable to the functional modification of other proteins for which detailed structural information is unavailable.

No abstract

Protein kinases, a class of enzymes that phosphorylate certain tyrosine, serine, and threonine residues, play an important role in cellular functions and are important targets in drug discovery research. Thus, it is of interest to develop a simple assay that can be used to measure protein kinase activity toward specific substrates and is suitable for the high throughput screening (HTS) of potential kinase inhibitors. The scintillation proximity concept has been successfully applied for measuring specific kinase activity using surfaces passively coated with a peptide substrate. In this study, we evaluated kinase assay performance on three ScintiStrip platforms: unmodified surface, streptavidin-coated surface, and streptavidin covalently attached to surface. The high affinity of streptavidin toward biotin-linked peptide substrates makes it a unique platform for measuring specific incorporation of radiolabeled phosphate into selected substrates of specific enzymes in the presence of others. Therefore, this assay may be used with cell extracts containing impure kinases as well as with purified enzymes. The scope of this assay was demonstrated with purified tyrosine kinases (e.g., p60c-src kinase) and A431 cell extracts. This scintillation proximity assay is universal, simple, rapid, accurate, and can be adapted for use with robotics for HTS.