Final Activity Report Summary - SMALL MOLECULE CHIP (Profiling Protein Activity on a Proteomic Scale Using Small Molecules Microarrays)
The overall goal of the project was to develop enabling technologies based on small molecule microarrays in order to profile the activity state of enzymes in crude cell lysates. We firstly focussed our attention on two protein families, the proteases and the kinases, as they were known to be important in post translational modifications.
We successfully developed a method to prepare small molecule microarrays that were designed to measure the activity of multiple proteins simultaneously and used the developed technology to measure the difference in enzymatic activity between cells having a different phenotype. We showed that this technology could also be used to discover inhibitors in a highly miniaturised format. These developments offered important new tools for basic research and had significant applications in diagnostics and personalised medicine.