Identificação de alvos moleculares de compostos por meio de proteólise pulsada e espectrometria de massa

Abstract

Tuberculosis is the infectious disease that causes more deaths worldwide, along with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Great efforts have been exerted in recent years to the search for new anti-tuberculosis drugs without success. Drug development platforms fail at different stages of the research and development process and one aspect that contributes to this is the lack of knowledge of the potential molecular drug targets. Both the elucidation of the bioactive compounds mechanism of action and the identification of their cellular targets are important for the development of new drugs. As an experimental alternative to the identification of molecular targets is pulse proteolysis technique, which determines the fraction of proteins differentially degraded after a brief incubation with proteases when comparing samples treated and untreated with a ligand. In this work, we developed the PePTID method: a new method for identification of molecular targets using pulse proteolysis and mass spectrometry analysis. The application of PePTID resulted in a reproducible procedure that minimizes the required amount of sample and provides a more robust analysis method compared to other approaches that use pulse proteolysis.