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BellBrook Labs Receives Grant for Novel HTS Assay

BellBrook Labs

Fluorescent light switch engineered into bacterial metabolite sensor to leap-frog limitations of conventional reagents

8 Sept 2016
Finn Price
Administrator / Office Personnel

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The National Institutes of General Medical Sciences (NGMS) has awarded a Phase II $860,000 Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant to BellBrook Labs, LLC for the commercialization of an innovative high-throughput screening (HTS) assay for histone methyltransferases. The AptaFluor™ Methyltransferase Assay overcomes the limitations of existing detection technologies by using a microbial sensor, or “riboswitch,” to transduce methyltransferase enzyme activity into a fluorescent signal.

The chemical modification of gene expression known as epigenetics has become a promising area for new drug discovery. Methyltransferases are the largest class of epigenetic enzymes, and many researchers are attempting to develop drugs that impede their pathogenic activities. While there is great potential to treat disease, methyltransferases have proven difficult to work with. BellBrook Lab’s aim is to commercialize an automated, high throughput screening platform for methyltransferases to be used for industrial drug discovery.

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AptaFluor™ SAH Methyltransferase Assay

BellBrook Labs

The AptaFluor® SAH Methyltransferase Assay Kit enables ultra-sensitive, direct detection of SAH—the universal product of methyltransferase reactions—using a riboswitch-based TR-FRET format. With no coupling enzymes required, it delivers high signal-to-background, Z’ ≥ 0.7, and is fully HTS-compatible for drug discovery and inhibitor screening.

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