Drug screening and drug target identification using yeast
Speaker: Yoko Yashiroda (RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science)
Host: Heike Brötz-Oesterhelt
Date & Time: 18.04.2024 | 12:30 – 2 p.m.
Venue: Lecture hall 3M07, GUZ
Public event. No registration needed.
Abstract:
Yeast has been making a great contribution to the biological sciences due to its facile genetic manipulation and a number of powerful genomics tools. In this seminar, I will introduce useful and efficient tools that we have developed for drug discovery using two yeast species, Schizosaccharomyces pombe and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. I would like to discuss the potential of yeast chemical genomics for drug discovery.
1) Yeast cell-based screening system for human tankyrase inhibitors
The telomere-associated protein tankyrase 1 (TNKS) is a poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase and is considered to be a promising target for cancer therapy, such as colorectal cancer. We established an efficient system for screening TNKS inhibitors, amenable to a high-throughput method, using the fission yeast S. pombe strain overexpressing the human TNKS gene and identified several potent inhibitors among ~140,000 compounds provided by the Drug Discovery Initiative at the University of Tokyo.
2) Yeast chemical genomics approach for target identification
We developed a drug target identification pipeline based on growth profiling of yeast essential gene mutant collections and the identification of mutations that confer drug-resistance using S. cerevisiae. We screened the RIKEN Natural Product Depository (NPDepo) library to identify highly bioactive compounds and their modes-of-action.