title: Fluorous photoaffinity labeling to probe protein-small molecule interactions.
abstract: Identifying cellular targets of bioactive small molecules is essential for their applications as chemical probes or drug candidates. Of equal importance is to determine their "off-target" interactions, which usually account for unwanted properties including toxicity. Among strategies to profile small molecule-interacting proteins, photoaffinity labeling has been widely used because of its distinct advantages such as sensitivity. When combined with mass spectrometry, this approach can provide additional structural and mechanistic information, such as drug-target stoichiometry and exact interacting amino acid residues. We have described a novel fluorous photoaffinity labeling approach, in which a fluorous tag is incorporated into the photoaffinity labeling reagent to enable the enrichment of the labeled species from complex mixtures for analysis. This new feature likely makes the fluorous photoaffinity labeling approach suitable to identify transient interactions, and low-abundant, low-affinity interacting proteins in a cellular environment.
authors.affiliation: Division of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, CB#7363, Room 4118F, Marsico Hall, 125 Mason Farm Rd., Chapel Hill, NC, 27599-7363, USA, wghuang@email.unc.edu.
authors.forename: Weigang
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Qisheng
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Zhang
mesh_terms: D007553:Isotope Labeling / Q000379:methods; D008024:Ligands; D015336:Molecular Probe Techniques; D019920:Photoaffinity Labels; D011485:Protein Binding; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000378:metabolism
chemical_list: D008024:Ligands; D019920:Photoaffinity Labels; D011506:Proteins