An NMR Functional Chemical Library

The NMR functional chemical library is a new type of compound library that focuses on aiding in the functional annotation of novel proteins that have been identified from various ongoing genomics efforts. The NMR functional chemical library is an integral component of our FAST-NMR assay and is composed of small molecules with known biological activity such as amino acids, carbohydrates, co-factors, hormones, inhibitors, known drugs, lipids, metabolites, nucleotides, neurotransmitters, substrates and vitamins.

The functional library was developed through an extensive manual effort of mining several databases based on known ligand interactions with protein systems. In order to increase the efficiency of screening the NMR functional library, the compounds are screened as mixtures of three to four compounds, avoiding the need to deconvolute positive hits by maintaining a unique NMR resonance and function for each compound in the mixture.

The compounds in the library are known to bind to certain classes of proteins. By identifying the types of ligands that bind to a hypothetical protein, the cellular function of the of the ligand and the functional classes of proteins known to bind the ligand can then be associated to the hypothetical protein or protein of unknown function.