Screening for bioactive compounds from natural products by ELISA assay

Combinatorial chemistry is one of the most interested topics in the area of drug discovery. One of the most important points is how to find a lead compound that gives the seed structure for designing of a combinatorial library. Natural products is suitable for searching a new bioactive compound with new structure. We have carried out systematic screening works to find natural products possessing the effects on inter-and intra-cellular signaling. Two hundreds extracts of medical plants and two thousands microbial culture broth samples have been tested for the induction and inhibition of IL-2 or IL-6 production (Fig. 1). ELISA is an efficient method for screenings from such a large number of samples. Now, we apply this method to search prion- binding agents.