Dataset Information

Quantitative RT-PCR assay for high-throughput screening (HTS) of drugs against the growth of Cryptosporidium parvum in vitro.

ABSTRACT: Our laboratory has previously developed a qRT-PCR assay to assess drug efficacy on the growth of Cryptosporidium parvum in vitro by detecting the levels of parasite 18S rRNA. This approach displayed up to four orders of magnitude of linear dynamic range and was much less labor-intensive than the traditional microscopic methods. However, conventional qRT-PCR protocol is not very amendable to high-throughput analysis when total RNA needs to be purified by lengthy, multi-step procedures. Recently, several commercial reagents are available for preparing cell lysates that could be directly used in downstream qRT-PCR analysis (e.g., Ambion Cell-to-cDNA kit and Bio-Rad iScript sample preparation reagent). Using these reagents, we are able to adapt the qRT-PCR assay into high-throughput screening of drugs in vitro (i.e., 96-well and 384-well formats for the cultivation of parasites and qRT-PCR detection, respectively). This qRT-PCR protocol is able to give a >150-fold linear dynamic range using samples isolated from cells infected with various numbers of parasites. The new assay is also validated by the NIH-recommended intra-plate, inter-plate, and inter-day uniformity tests. The robustness and effectiveness of the assay are also confirmed by evaluating the anti-cryptosporidial efficacy of paromomycin and by a small scale screening of compounds.

SUBMITTER: Zhang H

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4585199 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Quantitative RT-PCR assay for high-throughput screening (HTS) of drugs against the growth of Cryptosporidium parvum in vitro.

Zhang Haili H Zhu Guan G

Frontiers in microbiology 20150922

Our laboratory has previously developed a qRT-PCR assay to assess drug efficacy on the growth of Cryptosporidium parvum in vitro by detecting the levels of parasite 18S rRNA. This approach displayed up to four orders of magnitude of linear dynamic range and was much less labor-intensive than the traditional microscopic methods. However, conventional qRT-PCR protocol is not very amendable to high-throughput analysis when total RNA needs to be purified by lengthy, multi-step procedures. Recently, ...[more]

PMID: 26441920

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Project description:Quantitative high throughput screening (qHTS) assays use cells or tissues to screen thousands of compounds in a short period of time. Data generated from qHTS assays are then evaluated using nonlinear regression models, such as the Hill model, and decisions regarding toxicity are made using the estimates of the parameters of the model. For any given compound, the variability in the observed response may either be constant across dose groups (homoscedasticity) or vary with dose (heteroscedasticity). Since thousands of compounds are simultaneously evaluated in a qHTS assay, it is not practically feasible for an investigator to perform residual analysis to determine the variance structure before performing statistical inferences on each compound. Since it is well-known that the variance structure plays an important role in the analysis of linear and nonlinear regression models it is therefore important to have practically useful and easy to interpret methodology which is robust to the variance structure. Furthermore, given the number of chemicals that are investigated in the qHTS assay, outliers and influential observations are not uncommon. In this article we describe preliminary test estimation (PTE) based methodology which is robust to the variance structure as well as any potential outliers and influential observations. Performance of the proposed methodology is evaluated in terms of false discovery rate (FDR) and power using a simulation study mimicking a real qHTS data. Of the two methods currently in use, our simulations studies suggest that one is extremely conservative with very small power in comparison to the proposed PTE based method whereas the other method is very liberal. In contrast, the proposed PTE based methodology achieves a better control of FDR while maintaining good power. The proposed methodology is illustrated using a data set obtained from the National Toxicology Program (NTP). Additional information, simulation results, data and computer code are available online as supplementary materials.

Dataset Information

Quantitative RT-PCR assay for high-throughput screening (HTS) of drugs against the growth of Cryptosporidium parvum in vitro.

Publications

Quantitative RT-PCR assay for high-throughput screening (HTS) of drugs against the growth of Cryptosporidium parvum in vitro.

Similar Datasets

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