Benny Geiger's Lab

Rationale

Search for novel drugs that might interfere with cellular functions has been approached in recent years by screening of diverse chemical libraries and their modifications. Here we present a screen of a natural-products library. Such libraries have been shown to be rich sources for biologically active molecules. Screening natural extracts libraries oppose a challenge of finding the active compound within the affective extracts, using repeated fractionation. The sub-screen for effective fractions was conducted by us using the automated microscope. As a reporter we used cells that have fluorescently tagged paxillin, which localizes to focal adhesions. Focal adhesion characteristics, including their prominence, size, shape, molecular composition and spatial distribution, provide valuable information on cell structure, dynamics and function, and are, therefore good markers for drug effects.