A homogeneous bioluminescent immunoassay to probe cellular signaling pathway regulation.

Monitoring cellular signaling events can help better understand cell behavior in health and disease. Traditional immunoassays to study proteins involved in signaling can be tedious, require multiple steps, and are not easily adaptable to high throughput screening (HTS). Here, we describe a new immunoassay approach based on bioluminescent enzyme complementation. This immunoassay takes less than two hours to complete in a homogeneous "Add and Read" format and was successfully used to monitor multiple signaling pathways' activation through specific nodes of phosphorylation (e.g pIκBα, pAKT, and pSTAT3). We also tested deactivation of these pathways with small and large molecule inhibitors and obtained the expected pharmacology. This approach does not require cell engineering. Therefore, the phosphorylation of an endogenous substrate is detected in any cell type. Our results demonstrate that this technology can be broadly adapted to streamline the analysis of signaling pathways of interest or the identification of pathway specific inhibitors.

Quantifying CDK inhibitor selectivity in live cells.

Concerted multidisciplinary efforts have led to the development of Cyclin-Dependent Kinase inhibitors (CDKi's) as small molecule drugs and chemical probes of intracellular CDK function. However, conflicting data has been reported on the inhibitory potency of CDKi's and a systematic characterization of affinity and selectivity against intracellular CDKs is lacking. We have developed a panel of cell-permeable energy transfer probes to quantify target occupancy for all 21 human CDKs in live cells, and present a comprehensive evaluation of intracellular isozyme potency and selectivity for a collection of 46 clinically-advanced CDKi's and tool molecules. We observed unexpected intracellular activity profiles for a number of CDKi's, offering avenues for repurposing of highly potent molecules as probes for previously unreported targets. Overall, we provide a broadly applicable method for evaluating the selectivity of CDK inhibitors in living cells, and present a refined set of tool molecules to study CDK function.