A growing team of groundbreaking scientists around the world are now sharing their lab notebooks online
A large number of ACVR1/ALK2 inhibitors were previously synthesised by Paul Brenner’s team (Target Discovery Center, University of Oxford) for the purpose of treating Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva (FOP). Although these compounds were not designed with blood-brain-barrier permeability in mind, they can serve as good bench-marks for my cellular assays. Therefore, 30 of these legacy compounds Read More …
The EC50 of Tracer-6908 with ACVR1-c-nanoLuc and ideal conditions for the target engagement assay have been determined in a previous experiment. However, it is still necessary to verify that the IC50 values determined in the assay are closed enough approximation to the actual IC50 values of the compounds. If the IC50 values are strongly influenced Read More …
XIAP and its interaction with type I and type II receptors. Having spent time over the past few weeks purifying all the components needed for a pull down with XIAP, I did the experiment that looked for interactions between XIAP and various type I and type II receptors in both the un-phosphorylated and phosphorylated form. Read More …
I promised to post again today with an update on in-house screening of my hit for fragment screening, but sadly, there’s nothing to update, as yesterday turned into a litany of disappointment (not to be too much of a drama queen!). First, I started a fresh purification of ACVR1 to prepare for setting up new Read More …
Gosh, it’s been a while since I posted – not because I have nothing to report, but because I’ve been super busy in the lab trying to get things done, as well as having loads of meetings and a symposium. So, in the meantime, I’ve done two purifications of ACVR1 and set up crystal plates, Read More …
I don’t just want to check whether the compounds I’m testing kill DIPG cells, I want to check that they’re doing this by altering BMP signalling too. However, I can’t do this with the DIPG cells, because if a compound does work, and kill them, there’ll be no cell left to actually measure the amount Read More …
Purification of proteins for a pull down experiment between XIAP and various type I and type II receptors. XIAP is known to bind to the kinase RIPK2. RIPK2 is one of the few kinase proteins that shows overlap of reactivity to some of the compounds that we’ve been looking at in the context of ALK2 Read More …
In nanoBRET assay, a fluorescently labelled tracer binds to the ATP-binding pocket of ACVR1/ALK2. This binding brings the tracer into the proximity (<10nm) of Nano-Luciferase which is fused to the C-terminus of ACVR1/ALK2. Bioluminescence resonance energy transfer (BRET) occurs where the energy released by Nano-Luciferase is transferred to the fluorophore via intermolecular forces. Nano-Luciferase and Read More …
Deposition: In the past two weeks my work has mostly been full of dealing with structures. The first thing I needed to do was deposit some structures of ALK2 co-crystallised with three drug molecules that I had solved for our collaborators Swen Hoelder and Liam Hudson at ICR, who had been developing compounds against ALK2. Read More …
As you are probably aware by now, if you’ve read a few of my blogs, we are testing ATP competitive inhibitors to inhibit ALK2 but not any of the other 6 ALK family members. Thus, most of our activity and cellular assays test ALK2 as well as ALK5 activity in order to check the specificity Read More …
