A high-throughput screening assay for dipeptidyl peptidase-IV inhibitors using human plasma

Dipeptidyl peptidase-IV (DPP-IV) plays a critical role in glucose metabolism and has become an important target for type 2 diabetes mellitus. We previously reported a two-photon fluorescent probe glycyl-prolyl-N-butyl-4-amino-1,8-naphthalimide (GP-BAN) for DPP-IV detection with high specificity and sensitivity. In this study, a high-throughput screening (HTS) method for DPP-IV inhibitors using human plasma as the enzyme source was established and optimized. Further investigations demonstrate that the IC50 value of sitagliptin (listed as the DPP-IV inhibitor) determined with human recombinant DPP-IV (36.22 nM) is very similar to that in human plasma (39.18 nM), and sitagliptin acts as a competitive inhibitor against human plasma DPP-IV-mediated GP-BAN hydrolysis. These results indicate that expensive human recombinant DPP-IV can be replaced by human plasma in this GP-BAN-based assay. On this basis, GP-AMC (commercial probe) was used as a comparison to verify this method, and the catalytic efficacy (Vmax/Km) for GP-AMC (0.09 min-1) hydrolysis in human plasma is lower than that for GP-BAN (0.21 min-1). Further analysis of inhibition kinetics (sitagliptin) and molecular docking (GP-BAN and GP-AMC) showed that GP-BAN has better specificity and affinity for enzymes than GP-AMC. Finally, the optimized method was used for the HTS of DPP-IV inhibitors in 69 natural alkaloids.