Kinetic binding assays for the analysis of protein–ligand interactions

The importance of binding kinetics in terms of residence time and on-rate in drug discovery has been broadly accepted in the past few years. Furthermore, evidence has accumulated that the optimal binding mechanism of a drug to its target molecule is related to physiological efficacy as well as selectivity and thus drug safety. Homogeneous fluorescence-based binding assays have been shown to enable high throughput kinetics requiring only small amounts of protein and can be developed to elucidate even complex mechanisms of molecular recognition. A generalized approach is proposed that combines high quality kinetic and equilibrium data in an Integrated Global Fit analysis yielding the most probable binding mechanism.

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