Capillary electrophoresis (CE) is a high-resolution separation technique able to detect both high and low affinity molecular interactions. Selcia apply this technique to drug discovery screening offering screening services on a wide variety of targets.

CE is highly flexible and efficient, capable of detecting millimolar to nanomolar binding interactions. At Selcia we are able to offer an impressive range of screening services.

• Fragment screening
• Protein-protein interactions
• Protein-nucleic acid interactions
• Enzymatic inhibition assays
• Natural product screening

Selcia CE Screening Formats

• Direct-binding assays
  • Small molecules/natural products
• Functional assays
• Competitive displacement assays
  • Small molecules/fragments (CEfrag™ screen)/natural products

Multiple detection formats

• Laser-induced fluorescence
• Photo-Diode Array
• UV absorbance (different filters available)

Selcia CE Screening Targets

• Enzymes
• Membrane receptor domains
• Structural proteins
• Nucleic acid complexes
• Bioactive peptides
• Protein-protein interactions
• Antibodies

Background

Capillary electrophoresis has long been established in the life sciences industry as a powerful separation technique, especially suited to highly polar and complex molecules that are difficult to separate by other techniques. This high resolution, micro scale technique was pioneered as an analytical separation technique in the 1980’s. In the following decade it was adopted for biomolecular analysis and thus developed into an invaluable tool in medical and pharmaceutical research. From 2000 onwards turnkey micro fluidics systems became available for specific assays thus establishing CE as a widely used technique in pharmaceutical research. Helped by its powerful separation capabilities it gained a broad application spectrum ranging from protein and peptide technology via pharmaceutical analysis to genetic analysis. As it is well suited to detect strong and weak molecular interactions it became an invaluable tool for drug discovery screening and the technique was successfully commercialised for High Throughput Screening (HTS) by Cetek Corporation in the 1990’s. Cetek screened over 6 million compounds on more than 150 targets. Multiple leads were identified.

Selcia has acquired the core expertise from Cetek and further developed CE for fragment screening, natural product screening, protein-protein interactions and other drug discovery screening applications.
 

References

If you are interested in  further reading about the development and application of capillary electrophoresis as a screening tool in drug discovery, please check out the following references.