SwitchGear Genomics launches novel
high-throughput screening products for profiling biological pathway
regulation
29 October 2009
SwitchGear Genomics, Inc., a provider of products for studying
regulatory elements in the human genome, has launched cost-effective,
high-throughput research tools for screening transcriptional activation
and repression in a number of key biological pathways.
The new SwitchGear pathway sets utilize experimentally-validated
luciferase reporter vectors to accurately quantify human promoter
activity from complete sets of genes associated with inflammation,
cholesterol biosynthesis, oncology, vascular biology, nuclear hormone
receptor signalling, and many other important biological pathways.
“The SwitchGear panels of human promoter targets was selected from
our genome-wide reporter collection of promoters using motif analysis
and published functional genomic data sets,” said Shelley Force Aldred,
co-founder and President of SwitchGear Genomics, Inc.
“We then performed pathway-specific inductions to create an activity
profile across the set of constructs. We offer complete pathway
profiling sets of constructs in high-throughput plate formats that
empower researchers to efficiently profile the effects of many compounds
and conditions.”
In addition, the company provides a smaller subset of “key responder”
promoter constructs that showed a strong induction response in the
experiments and which may be used as biomarkers in primary screening
applications.
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health screened over 1400
compounds to test hypoxia pathway stimulation and published the results
in an article entitled “Identification of Chemical Compounds that Induce
HIF-1alpha Activity.”
The screening process, including the use of the SwitchGear Genomics
hypoxia set of promoter reporter assays, differentiated between 3
hypoxia mimetics and 2 other compounds that triggered the pathway
independent of HIF-1alpha, a result important for effective compound
screening.
In addition to the hypoxia (HIF1a) pathway products, SwitchGear
offers the following reporter assay profiling sets in both plate format
and biomarker subsets: CREB, NF-kB, heat shock (HSF), p53, STAT, serum
response factor (SRF), and cholesterol biosynthesis (SREBP). In
addition, the company offers nuclear receptor sets for estrogen
receptor, androgen receptor, and glucocorticoid receptor pathways.