American Chemical Society, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 8(136), p. 3264-3270, 2014
DOI: 10.1021/ja412934t
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We describe the development and validation of in situ interaction determination (ISID), a method that selectively amplifies DNA sequences identifying ligand+target pairs from a mixture of DNA-linked small molecules and unpurified protein targets in cell lysates. By operating in cell lysates, ISID preserves native post-translational modifications and interactions with endogenous binding partners, thereby enabling the study of difficult-to-purify targets and increasing the potential biological relevance of detected interactions compared with methods that require purified proteins. In ISID, target proteins are associated with DNA oligonucleotide tags in situ either noncovalently using a DNA-linked antibody, or covalently using a SNAP-tag. Ligand-target binding promotes hybridization of a self-priming hairpin that is extended by a DNA polymerase to create a DNA strand that contains sequences identifying both the target and its ligand. These sequences encoding ligand+target pairs are revealed by PCR amplification and high-throughput DNA sequencing. ISID can respond to the effect of affinity-modulating adaptor proteins in cell lysates that would be absent in ligand screening or selection methods using a purified protein target. This capability was exemplified by the 100-fold amplification of DNA sequences encoding FRB+rapamycin or FKBP+rapamycin in samples overexpressing both FRB and FKBP (FRB•rapamycin+FKBP Kd = ~100 fM; FKBP•rapamycin+FRB Kd = 12 nM). In contrast, these sequences were amplified 10-fold less efficiently in samples overexpressing either FRB or FKBP alone (rapamycin+FKBP Kd = 0.2 nM; rapamcyin+FRB Kd =26 µM). Finally, ISID was used to process a model library of DNA-linked small molecules and a model library of cell lysates expressing SNAP-target fusions combined in a single sample. In this library x library experiment, ISID resulted in enrichment of sequences corresponding to five known ligand+target pairs ranging in binding affinity from Kd = 0.2 nM to 3.2 µM out of 67,858 possible combinations, with no false positive signals enriched to the same extent as that of any of the bona fide ligand+target pairs.