Development of an automated assay for accelerated in vitro detection of DNA adduct-inducing and crosslinking agents

Current techniques for the identification of DNA adduct-inducing and DNA interstrand crosslinking agents include electrophoretic crosslinking assays, electrophoretic gel shift assays, DNA and RNA stop assays, mass spectrometry-based methods and ³²P-post-labelling. While these assays provide considerable insight into the site and stability of the interaction, they are relatively expensive, time-consuming and sometimes rely on the use of radioactively-labelled components, and thus are ill-suited to screening large numbers of compounds. A novel medium throughput assay was developed to overcome these limitations and was based on the attachment of a biotin-tagged double stranded (ds) oligonucleotide to Corning DNA-Bind plates. We aimed to detect anthracycline and anthracenedione DNA adducts which form by initial non-covalent intercalation with duplex DNA, and subsequent covalent adduct formation which is mediated by formaldehyde. Following drug treatment, DNA samples were subjected to a denaturation step, washing and then measurement by fluorescence to detect remaining drug-DNA species using streptavidin-europium. This dissociation-enhanced lanthanide fluorescent immunoassay (DELFIA) is a time-resolved fluorescence intensity assay where the fluorescence signal arises only from stabilised drug-DNA complexes. We applied this new methodology to the identification of anthracycline-like compounds with the ability to functionally crosslink double-strand oligonucleotides. The entire procedure can be performed by robotics, requiring low volumes of compounds and reagents, thereby reducing costs and enabling multiple compounds to be assessed on a single microtitre plate.