gene expression in cultured cell lines - (Aug/17/2016 )

Hi all, 

When we are checking the natural compounds and synthesized chemicals for their potential as bioactive compounds, the most common methods are assay for the cellular products in a chemical reaction. Cant we use molecular biological methods and study gene  expression in cultured cells and study protein production?

When people develop new compounds, they often target key metabolic enzymes as targets. How can one go ahead with identifying and development of a novel marker system?  

Yes you can, a biological/effectiveness (rather than looking for metabolic outputs that indicate use of the compound) read-out is useful for these sorts of assays. However, this is of most use when you know which pathways you are looking to target and what might be result. Note that gene expression is only half the story, you also need to look at protein expression to determine the functional output.

Novel marker systems are "a dime a dozen" basically you can make a marker out of anything that shows a consistent response to a treatment. Having said that, it can take years of development and research to get the biomarker working and accepted by the science community.