G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) represent the largest protein family encoded by the human genome. Located on the cell membrane, they transduce extracellular signals into key physiological effects.^[1]
Considering this feature, they have become highly studied drug targets.

Are you working on autophagy,? Or on GPCR de-orphaning? On the MAP kinase pathway or cellular metabolism? Maybe on pathways related to cellular metabolism?

Several compounds are known as modulators of these pathways and research fields and can be used as useful tools to study and characterize specific steps. Nonetheless, it is quite time consuming and expensive to order all these chemicals from different sources. Targeted compound libraries represent a convenient alternative.

Autotaxin (ATX) is a secreted lysophospholipase D involved in the release of the lipid mediator LPA. Many research tools have been developed to study ATX-LPA signaling.  In this post, I invite you to discover a few of them aimed at vizualizing, quantifying or inhibiting the “ATX-LPA” related pathway.

RIPA buffer is one of the most useful protein extraction buffers and maintains most native structures of proteins. Nevertheless, RIPA buffer is not convenient enough to extract membrane proteins and membrane-associated proteins concentrated in lipid raft.

Lipid raft is a highly unique microdomain on the lipid bilayer which contains special lipids, cholesterol and functional proteins. In this layer, lipid raft-enriched proteins are usually insoluble in mild detergent buffers such as 1% Triton X-100 and RIPA buffer. Consequently, it was, up to now, difficult to analyze the functions of this kind of proteins.