Metal ions such as GaIII, AllII, FeIII are known to bind phosphate in an nonionic check details manner (Porath et al., 1975). In the case of IMAP, the fluorescently labeled peptide forms a complex with metal-chelated nanoparticles that is easily measured using FP. As well, iron chelates have been employed to bind phosphorylated peptides labeled with fluorescein which results in quenching of the fluorescein fluorescence (“Iron Quench”, or IQ technology) (Morgan et al., 2004). The limitation of FP based-detection is that the polypeptide product must be <10,000 MW when fluorescent labels with typical lifetimes are used, which will prevent the use of full length physiological substrates. However, IMAP has been adapted to FRET based

systems where size

limitations on the polypeptide substrate are less restrictive, although the distance between the donor and acceptor fluorophores must be within 10 nm for Förster resonance energy transfer to occur (Klumpp et al., 2006). A convenient alternative to IMAP that has been applied to both kinases and phosphatases is to use polyarginine instead of IMAP beads. Nikiforov and Simeonov (2003) explored assays based RO4929097 ic50 on the change of two charge units in a peptide upon addition/removal of a phosphate group. In the assay, the negative charge shift results in a change in peptide affinity towards an oppositely-charged arginine homopolymer. With proper adjustment of the ionic strength and optimization of assay conditions even systems such as that of LAR phosphatase, where the substrate Fl-DADE(pY)L-CONH2 carries a net charge of −7 while its dephosphorylation product is −5 charged, can be monitored by this approach. A hybrid system that employs both a coupling enzyme and sometimes Monoiodotyrosine an antibody is represented by enzyme fragment complementation (EFC; HitHunter™, DiscoveRx) technology. In one example, β-galactosidase is split to create a so-called enzyme acceptor (EA) fragment and an enzyme donor (ED) peptide (approximately 4 kDa) (Eglen, 2002 and Eglen and Singh, 2003). To construct a kinase assay, the ED peptide is synthesized to contain a phosphorlyated peptide sequence so that a competitive immunoassay

is set up using antibodies that are highly specific for the phosphorylated peptide. Production of unlabeled phosphorylated peptide by the kinase frees the ED-labeled phosphorylated peptide from the antibody allowing reconstruction of active β-galactosidase which is then detected. Another technique without the size limitations of FP that has been applied to kinases is AlphaScreen (Burns et al., 2006). AlphaScreen employs 250 nm diameter beads containing chemiluminescent reagents to create donor and acceptor beads (Ullman et al., 1994). Irradiating the donor bead with a high intensity laser emitting light at 680 nm excites a photosensitizer in the beads which results in conversion of ambient oxygen to singlet oxygen. A large amount of singlet oxygen is produced (60,000 molecules/s) resulting in large signal amplification.