Small-molecule compounds remain the major source of therapeutic and preventative drugs. Developing new drugs against a protein target often requires screening large collections of compounds with diverse structures for ligands or ligand fragments that exhibit sufficiently affinity and desirable inhibition effect on the target before further optimization and development. Since the number of small molecule compounds is large, high-throughput screening (HTS) methods are needed. Small-molecule microarrays (SMM) on a solid support in combination with a suitable binding assay form a viable HTS platform. We demonstrate that by combining an oblique-incidence reflectivity difference optical scanner with SMM we can screen 10,000 small-molecule compounds on a single glass slide for protein ligands without fluorescence labeling. Furthermore using such a label-free assay platform we can simultaneously acquire binding curves of a solution-phase protein to over 10,000 immobilized compounds, thus enabling full characterization of protein-ligand interactions over a wide range of affinity constants.
human genome acts as a multifunctional transcriptional unit. The genome is transcribed pervasively in both sense and antisense directions, and each transcriptional unit can give rise to multiple
With the exponential growth of research efforts on non-coding microRNAs (miRNAs) in the past decade, miRNAs have been demonstrated to be important in many major human diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Due to the broad regulatory function of miRNAs, alterations of their expression can have profound consequences on multiple critical genes and pathways. One of the major issues related to the success of treating advanced colorectal cancer is chemoresistance. In this review, we will present some of the recent advancements in miRNA research related to chemoresistance mechanisms to 5-FU based chemotherapy in colorectal cancer and cancer stem cells. We believe that this miRNA-mediated resistance mechanism will offer novel strategies to develop future anti-cancer therapies.
