Anti-infective Compound Screening Service

The discovery of anti-infective compound usually starts with in vitro screening of test compounds followed by in vivo testing of potential drugs. If mammals are selected as the model for in vivo testing, there are limitations such as high cost, time-consuming and ethical now. To overcome these limitations, C. elegans can be used for initial screening of anti-infective compounds. Here, we offer a high-throughput anti-infective compounds screen service using the advanced automatic equipment to meet our customers' research needs in this area.

C. elegans as a Model for Anti-infective Compound Screening

The nematode C. elegans, a live animal has been used in small molecule screening systems to identify anti-infective compounds with therapeutic potential. Due to the notable similarities between the nematode and higher vertebrates at molecular and cellular levels, it seems that C. elegans exhibit superior function over conventional antibiotics in the discovery of novel therapeutics for human infections.

C. elegans allows for the detection of compounds that may alter the virulence of pathogens or enhance host immune responses.
As a hermaphrodite, C. elegans is self-fertilized, which not only makes it cost-effective to rapidly culture large numbers of worms for drug testing, but also does not impose ethical constraints.
C. elegans is suitable for fully automated high-throughput screening, where hundreds of animals can be dispensed into 96- and 384-well plates to screen larger libraries of compounds.
The use of fluorescent dyes allows easy access to sophisticated hardware and software for image capture and data analysis.

Fig.1 Schematic diagram illustrating the possible outcomes of a Caenorhabditis elegans-based anti-infective screen. (Kong C, et al., 2016)

Our Services

At CD BioSciences, we offer fully customized screening of anti-infective compounds using our C. elegans high-throughput screening platform. Anti-infective compound screening is performed by monitoring worm survival after exposing C. elegans to pathogens and compounds to be tested. Our services include but are not limited to:

Screening for Immunostimulatory Compounds

Screening for Immunostimulatory Compounds

This is an emerging strategy to develop new anti-infective small molecules by selectively modulating host innate immunity. CD BioSciences utilizes C. elegans transgenic, GFP-based immune reporter strains in a high-throughput screening platform to help you perform primary screening of pairs of compound libraries for immunostimulatory molecules.

Screening for Anti-virulence Compounds

Screening for Anti-virulence Compounds

This method refers to the screening of anti-infective compounds with virulence factors that destroy pathogens. Biofilms play a key role in bacterial pathogenesis and are another important virulence factor. We can help you screen not only for anti-infective compounds that interfere with bacterial virulence factors, but also for anti-infective compounds that target biofilms.

Screening for Pathogen-targeting Compounds

Screening for Pathogen-targeting Compounds

Utilizing our excellent C. elegans high-throughput screening platform, we also offer screening services for anti-infective compounds by directly targeting pathogens. In addition, to complement our antibiotic discovery services, we deploy C. elegans-based pathogenesis assays to identify new antifungal therapies in our platform.

Workflow of Our Services

Culturing C. elegans: C. elegans is cultured on agar plates inoculated with E. coli (OP 50).

C. elegans exposed to pathogen.

Automated sorting of C. elegans into assay wells.

Automated addition of compound libraries into assay wells

Automated image analysis and data analysis

Scored for dead and live C. elegans
GFP reporter gene analysis
Specific stain
Survival analysis

CD BioSciences is a dedicated provider of C. elegans model services. Here we provide anti-infective compounds screening service, involving immunostimulatory compounds, anti-virulence compounds and pathogen-targeting compounds. We are dedicated to accelerating the speed to achieve customers' research goals with high-quality. If you are interested in our service, please feel free to contact us for more information.

Reference

Kong C, Eng SA, Lim MP, et al. Beyond Traditional Antimicrobials: A Caenorhabditis elegans Model for Discovery of Novel Anti-infectives[J]. Front Microbiol. 2016, 2(7): 1956.

For research use only.

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