Substrate activity screening (SAS) is a fragment-based method for the rapid development of novel substrates and their conversion into non-peptidic inhibitors of Cys and Ser proteases. The method consists of three steps: (i) a library of N-acyl aminocoumarins with diverse, low-molecular-weight N-acyl groups is screened to identify protease substrates using a simple fluorescence-based assay; (ii) the identified N-acyl aminocoumarin substrates are optimized by rapid analog synthesis and evaluation; and (iii) the optimized substrates are converted into inhibitors by direct replacement of the aminocoumarin with known mechanism-based pharmacophores. This protocol describes a general procedure for the solid-phase synthesis of a library of N-acyl aminocoumarin substrates and the screening procedure to identify weak binding substrates.
INTRODUCTIONWe have developed the first substrate-based fragment identification method, called 'substrate activity screening' (SAS) 1-3 . This method addresses two key challenges in fragment-based screening: (i) the accurate and efficient identification of weak binding fragments and (ii) the rapid optimization of the initial weak binding fragments into higher-affinity compounds 4,5 . In this method (Fig. 1), a library of N-acyl aminocoumarins with diverse, low-molecular-weight N-acyl fragments is prepared and then, in a first step, the library is screened to identify protease substrates using a single-step, highthroughput fluorescence-based assay. The substrate-based screening method in Step 1 has important attributes in detecting weak binding fragments in addition to being high throughput and straightforward to perform. False positives as a result of aggregation, protein precipitation or non-specific binding seen in traditional inhibitor screens are not observed. In fact, in the present approach, both an active enzyme and productive active-site binding are required for the protease-catalyzed amide bond hydrolysis to occur and for the subsequent release of the fluorescent coumarin group to be observed. In addition, in contrast to direct binding assays and traditional inhibitor screens, catalytic substrate turnover results in signal amplification, and therefore even very weak substrates can be identified at concentrations where only minimal binding to the enzyme occurs. The second and third steps (Fig. 1), which are not covered in this protocol, provide a strategy for systematically and efficiently optimizing substrates incorporating weak binding fragments into high-affinity inhibitors. In the second step, the activity of the substrates is rapidly optimized by the straightforward solidphase synthesis and subsequent assay of focused libraries of substrate analogs. The