Large-scale analysis of UPR-mediated apoptosis in human cells

The historic distinction between academic- and industry-driven drug discovery, whereby academicians worked to identify therapeutic targets and pharmaceutical companies advanced probe discovery, has been blurred by an academic high-throughput chemical genomic revolution. It is now common for academic labs to use biochemical or cell-based high-throughput screening (HTS) to investigate the effects of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of chemical probes on one or more targets over a period of days or weeks. To support the efforts of individual investigators, many universities have established core facilities where screening can be performed collaboratively with large chemical libraries managed by highly trained HTS personnel and guided by the experience of computational, medicinal, and synthetic organic chemists. The identification of large numbers of promising hits from such screens has driven the need for independent labs to scale down secondary in vitro assays in the hit to lead identification process. In this chapter, we will describe the use of luminescent and quantitative reverse transcription real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) technologies that permit evaluation of the expression patterns of multiple unfolded protein response (UPR) and apoptosis-related genes, and simultaneously evaluate proliferation and cell death in 96- or 384-well format.