METSCREEN - A Chemical Biology Approach to Identify Interactions of Proteins with Small Molecules
Flavonols are one group of phytochemicals that have important bioactivities in animals and microorganisms, and which play central roles in plant biology. However, the identification of flavonol targets has remained elusive because of the technical difficulties associated with the identification of protein targets for small proteins. Our research interest is to study how flavonoids in general, and flavonols in particular, function as signal molecules by binding to particular cellular proteins, and to identify and characterize these targets. We are developing a chemical-biology approach that relies on detecting interactions of proteins with photoaffinity-tagged flavonoid analogs in maize and Arabidopsis . This approach is termed as METSCREEN (screen with metabolites).
METSCREEN provides a powerful tool to fill a central gap in genome-proteome-metabolome continuum, which may have widely potential applications, such as to identify missing enzymes in metabolic pathway, to identify new enzymes that modify specific small molecules, to establish ligand-receptor relationships or to identify targets for drugs of plant origin. This approach is likely to open a new dimension in the rationale design of plant metabolic engineering proposal.
