Shen et al (Nature Methods, 2017) explore and identify synthetic interactions among 73 cancer-associated genes. To perform their loss of function screen they combined CAS9-expressing cell lines with a sgRNA library of high titer lentiviral particles. Most of these gene interactions were subsequently validated by drug treatment.

If you are looking for enzymatic in vitro tools for drug metabolism, reaction phenotyping, metabolite generation, using pig as model, you may find these newly released Pig Bactosomes from Cypex of interest.

Bactosomes are recombinant enzymes expressed in E. coli with a patented expression system that enables expression of drug metabolising enzymes without the need for large modifications to be made to the proteins. They demonstrate excellent batch-to-batch consistency and robust activity levels. Each batch is characterized for linearity with time and CYP concentration, Km and Vmax.

Metabolite characterization can be a lengthy process making your in vitro drug testing time consuming and expensive. Whether you are working on phase I or phase II metabolic enzymatic reactions, take a look at these BMO kits which can help you speed up this characterisation process.

The Phase I BMO metabolism kits take you through 3 simple steps:

1. Perform the primary screen and select the desired metabolite wells (XTHCK1001-01)
2. Perform the optimization and identify the best production conditions
3. Scale-up and isolate the metabolite

A single-domain antibody (sdAb, also called Nanobody) is an antibody fragment consisting of a single monomeric variable antibody domain. Like a whole antibody, it is able to bind selectively to a specific antigen. With a molecular weight of only 12–15 kDA, single-domain antibodies are much smaller than common antibodies (150–160 kDa). They have been shown to be just as specific as a regular antibody and in some cases more robust. They are being researched for multiple pharmaceutical applications in in vivo imaging and targeted therapy. eg. the fusion of a fluorescent protein to a single-domain antibody can be used to trace targets in different compartments of living cells. They can therefore increase the possibilities of live cell microscopy and will enable novel functional studies.