Real-time sulfotransferase assay
November 8, 2022 by ferniglab
More sulfation
Earlier this year Simon Wheeler (who now has a well deserved substantive position, congratulations!) and Steve Butler published the first output from the BBSRC TDRI awarded to Steve, with myself and Ed Yates in supporting roles. It is always nice to collaborate with real chemists, as it reminds me I am very much a pseudo chemist, and I learn a lot. After what I would consider a quite heroic effort on the synthesis front, Simon and Steve pulled out a very useful sensor, based on a europium complex. The Eu sensor has good selectivity for PAP over PAPS, the universal sulfate donor. The assay works well and is very amenable to high throughput 384 well format assays (= more papers on the way). So we can now measure sulfotransferase activity in realt-ime independently of the acceptor for pretty much any enzyme-substrate combination. This represents an important tool for the wider sulfotransferase community.
The paper also demonstrates the importance of social media in science, as a means to access in a non-direct manner new information that sets off an innovative project. I saw tweet from @Fieldlab highlighting a paper from Steve’s lab on lanthanide sensors able to discriminate nucleotide phosphates and read the paper. Naively I thought PAP/PAPS sensing using such compounds should be easy, so I contacted Steve. After some preliminary tests with PAP and PAPS on his side, we wrote the grant – another lesson here, as the application neared final from I went over to Loughborough for a meeting, which allowed us to iron out a few problems far more effectively than by electronic communication. The work was, as hinted above, far from straightforward, but like everything that is new, very rewarding and continues to be so.
I have just moved from the bird site to the proboscidean one and things look like there will be even more of such ‘random access’ of information there, so let’s see what turns up!