Basis of a high-throughput method for nuclear receptor ligands.

Assessment of the risk of human exposure to man-made chemicals that bind to hormone receptors has emerged as a major public health issue. Among hormone receptors, nuclear receptors tend to be targets of xenobiotics because their endogenous ligands are small, fat-soluble molecules. Nuclear receptors are ligand-inducible transcriptional factors and regulate the transcriptional activity of various target genes. At the start of the initiation step of transcription, nuclear receptors interact with coactivators (TIF2, SRC1, ACTR, CBP/p300, etc.) in an agonist-dependent manner. Using the interaction of the nuclear receptor with a coactivator, we have developed a novel rapid ligand in vitro screening method that is easy to use and has high sensitivity. This method, called by us the CoA-BAP system, is applicable to most nuclear receptors and is suitable for high-throughput screening because the entire experimental operation can be carried out on a microplate. We used human TIF2 as a coactivator including LXXLL motifs expressed in Escherichia coli as a fusion protein with BAP and nuclear receptor LBD expressed in E. coli as a fusion protein with GST. On a GSH-coupled microplate these proteins were incubated with chemicals and the protein-protein interactions were detected as alkaline phosphatase activity. To date we have examined seven nuclear receptors (ERalpha/beta, TRalpha, RARalpha/gamma, RXRalpha,and VDR) and confirmed that the method works well.