New method may accelerate drug discovery for difficult diseases like P...(ature Chemical Biology paper and a post...)

"I think it's a very exciting method," says Lindquist, who is also a professor of biology at MIT and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. "It provides much greater diversity in the chemical compounds you can study because you can screen millions of compounds in the same go."

Adapting previous work by the Benkovic lab at Pennsylvania State University, Kritzer created a vast "library" of cyclic peptides containing various amino acid combinations. He then inserted the cyclic peptides into cells of a well-established yeast model of Parkinson's disease that was created in the Lindquist lab.

Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by tremors, muscle rigidity, and slowed movements. In the neural cells of Parkinson's patients' brains, researchers have noted Lewy bodies, abnormal aggregates primarily composed of the protein alpha-synuclein. There is currently no cure for the disease, and current Parkinson's therapies only address disease symptoms. In the Lindquist yeast model, the cells exhibit many of the hallmarks of cells in Parkinson's disease patients' brains, including death due to toxic overproduction of alpha-synuclein.

Once the cyclic peptides were inserted into the model yeast cells, Kritzer switched the yeast into Parkinson's mode and waited to see which yeast cells survived. Of the approximately 5 million yeast cells that were inserted with a cyclic peptide, Kritzer ended up with only two cyclic peptides able to rescue the cells from death.

After sequencing them, Kritzer found that both effective cyclic peptides needed only the first four amino acids to work and those amino acids had a common motif (cysteine any amino acid a hydrophobic amino acid cysteine). This particular four-amino-acid motif is very similar to some important biochemical structures, including molecules t
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