GPCR

Kinases are a large and diverse group of enzymes which are the focus of roughly 1/3 of all drug development efforts due to their association with multiple diseases. Consequently, there is demand for assays that can detect kinase activity and subsequently their modulation by drug compounds. This has led to multiple commercial offerings that employ a variety of different detection technologies. Many of these assays employ microplates to allow for the measurement of 96 up to 1536 samples in parallel for which a multi-mode microplate reader is employed to read the experiment.

It is hard to consider life without calcium. Calcium ions play a central role in a huge variety of biological functions and cellular processes – from fertilisation, development and differentiation to metabolism, cell proliferation, secretion and muscle contraction, as well as brain functions including learning and memory¹. This blog explains some of the many roles of calcium, and discusses the different ways that calcium ions can be measured. 

In many industries including the pharmaceutical industry and academia, relative potency is an important measure when characterising a compound. Relative potency refers to the amount of a compound required to produce an effect when compared to another compound.  For example, a drug is considered to be more potent relative to another if it produces the same effect at a lower concentration.

We read with great interest the recent Cell paper entitled ‘Pharmacogenomics of GPCR Drug Targets’. The authors used a PHERAstar FS to monitor a BRET assay that looked at activation of GPCR.

Second messengers are intracellular molecules that transmit signals triggered by extracellular "first" messengers. We explain how fast second messenger responses are measured on a microplate reader.