In a changing environment, an organism must also change in order to survive. Nucleotides are key second messengers that relay changes in the environment to physiological changes in organisms to adapt to environmental stress. Recently, cyclic dinucleotides, such as c-di-GMP, c-di-AMP, cGAMP etc, have come to the forefront because they are involved in important signal transduction processes in a variety of bacteria (c-di-AMP and c-di-GMP) as immune modulators in higher organisms (cGAMP as well as c-di-AMP and c-di-GMP). Due to the importance of nucleotides as second messengers, efforts have increased to characterize receptors that mediate nucleotide signaling in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes and to discover inhibitors of the keys nucleotide receptors. Central to these efforts is the ability to detect these nucleotides. Herein, we describe a surprisingly simple strategy to detect nucleotide second messengers with fluorescent reporters and describe how these fluorescent reporters could be used to discover new inhibitors of nucleotide signaling in bacteria.

New fluorescent assays for the detection of cyclic dinucleotides facilitate the discovery of inhibitors of nucleotide signaling

247th National Meeting (2014)

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