文摘
We have developed a systematic strategy for drug targetidentification. This consists of the following sequentialsteps: (1) enrichment of total binding proteins using twodifferential affinity matrixes upon which are immobilizedpositive and negative chemical structures for drug activity,respectively; (2) covalent labeling of the proteins with anew cleavable isotope-coded affinity tag (ICAT) reagent,followed by proteolysis of the combined proteins; (3)isolation, identification, and relative quantification of thetagged peptides by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry; (4) array-based transcription profiling to selectcandidate proteins; and (5) confirmation of direct interaction between the activity-associated structure and theselected proteins by using surface plasmon resonance. Wepresent a typical application to identify the primarybinding protein of a novel class of anticancer agentsexemplified by E7070. Our results suggest that thisapproach provides a new aspect of quantitative proteomicsto find specific binding proteins from protein mixture andshould be applicable to a wide variety of biologically activesmall molecules with unidentified target proteins.