Thursday, April 5, 2012
High throughput sequencing for drug discovery. As reported in Li et al., a high throughput
sequencing platform could aid the discovery of compounds that reverse gene
expression changes associated with disease.
method, a profile is generated of gene expression changes associated with a
disease state. A range of housekeeping- and cytotoxicity-related genes are
incorporated into the panel to control for a compound's specificity.
cells are loaded into the wells of a microtiter plate, and a different library
compound is added to each well [a]. Cells are then lysed, and the resulting
lysate is profiled and transferred to a next-generation sequencing system for
sequencing and quantification [b]. Compounds are evaluated based on
their ability to modulate the expression of disease-associated genes without
significantly affecting the expression of housekeeping- and cytotoxicity-related
throughput nature of the approach allows researchers to screen libraries for
compounds that correct disease-linked genetic signatures.