Resources for researchers: access to the natural products collection and the rapid screening facility at the University of Strathclyde

The rapid screening laboratory is operated by SIDR in the Arbuthnott Building (SIBS546). It has developed in the last ten years from being an industry-funded drug discovery facility based on natural product screening to a resource that is available to academics in Strathclyde and elsewhere for drug discovery assays and for preliminary in vitro toxicology assessments. The facility is available for collaborative projects with SULSA collaborators.

The lab is equipped with automated liquid handling instruments and plate readers for absorbance, fluorescence, time-resolved fluorescence, luminescence and radiometric measurements. More details are given in the Table.

Molecular and cell-based assays are run routinely, and the lab is equipped for culturing mammalian cells and ACDP Group 2 bacteria and parasites.

In addition to smaller proprietary chemical libraries, the lab uses the Maybridge HitFinder collection of 14,000 drug-like compounds and the SIDR natural product collection. The latter is 5120 extracts from around the world; with coverage of 90% of plant families, it is one of the most biodiverse (and hence chemically diverse) collections available for screening. The collection is plated on 96-well plates with 80 different samples per plate. There are facilities for the fractionation of hit extracts, isolation of active compounds, and determination of structures.

The facilities and the chemical libraries are available to on a collaborative basis. Assays can be developed and optimised and used to screen the SIDR compound collections or compounds provided by collaborators.

The time required for a screening campaign depends on the amount of assay optimisation that is necessary and the time to buy specialist reagents and grow any required cells. From that point, a standard biochemical assay using either the Maybridge collection or the natural product library should take three weeks for assays, analysis and reporting. Four cell-based assays can be run in parallel and screening campaigns on these would also be completed in three weeks.

Compound evaluation

In addition to screening of compound collections on assays proposed by collaborators, externally provided compounds can be assessed on in vitro toxicity assays. These include measurement of cytotoxicity in mammalian cells (human, mouse, rat, hamster), determination of effects on the cell cycle using flow cytometry, effects on hERG channels as a predictor of cardiotoxicity, micronucleus formation in mammalian cells to test for genotoxic effects, and induction of Hprt mutations to test for mutagenic effects in mammalian cells.

For more information, contact
Professor Alan Harvey
SIDR,
University of Strathclyde,
27 Taylor Street
Glasgow G4 0NR

Tel: 0141 553 4155
Fax: 0141 552 8376

Email: sidr@strath.ac.uk

Table: Available equipment for liquid handling and bioassays