A green-fluorogenic, cysteine-reactive dye enables thermal shift-based high-throughput screening with membrane proteins
Anselm FL Schneider, Michelle Keifler, Yung-Ning Chang, Jörg Weiske, Vera Pütter · 2026
Read A green-fluorogenic, cysteine-reactive dye enables thermal shift-based high-throughput screening with membrane proteins by Anselm FL Schneider, Michelle Keifler, Yung-Ning Chang, Jörg Weiske, Vera Pütter (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13681967.txt.
Description
Anselm Schneider and co-authors find a dye that lets drug hunters run heat tests on membrane proteins, the hardest targets in the business. Thermal shift assays watch a protein unfold as it warms and are cheap to set up, but the usual glow dyes fail on membrane proteins floating in detergent. A workaround uses dyes that light up when they grab cysteine, a building block common inside membrane spans. Their 2026 study trials several new candidates.
One dye, called Naph-EA-Mal, read melting points reliably at low amounts and across many buffers and protein classes. The team used it to tune the buffer for an ion channel and to screen small fragments against a carrier protein called Spns2. The screen surfaced a new binder shape that could seed future Spns2 blockers. The authors offer the dye as a practical key to a locked screening room.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Anselm FL Schneider, Michelle Keifler, Yung-Ning Chang, Jörg Weiske, Vera Pütter |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 25 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |