Here we summarize recent and developing chemical approaches for modulating signaling pathways. In particular, we discuss targeting mutant signaling proteins, disrupting protein-protein interactions in cellular signaling networks, designing bivalent inhibitors of signaling proteins and identifying allosteric regulators of signaling enzymes. Over the past decade, great progress in the harvesting of chemical tools for basic research and clinical medicine has been made, but many challenges remain, and examples of exciting future targets are highlighted.
Identifying direct substrates targeted by protein kinases is important in understanding cellular physiology and intracellular signal transduction. Mass-spectrometry based quantitative proteomics provides a powerful tool for comprehensively characterizing the downstream substrates of protein kinases. This approach is efficiently applied to receptor kinases which can be precisely, directly, and rapidly activated by some agent, such as a growth factor. However, non-receptor tyrosine kinase Abl lacks the experimental advantage of extracellular growth factors as immediate and direct stimuli. To circumvent this limitation, we combine a chemical rescue approach with quantitative phosphoproteomics to identify targets of Abl and their phosphorylation sites with enhanced temporal resolution. Both known and novel putative substrates are identified, presenting opportunities for studying unanticipated functions of Abl under physiological and pathological conditions.
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