Affinity Selection Mass Spectrometry (ASMS)

Evotec offers affinity selection-mass spectrometry (AS-MS). This technique is a binding assay typically used in high-throughput screening to identify ligands which bind to specific biomolecular targets.

Evotec offers affinity screening by online SEC-LC/MS (Size Exclusion Chromatography coupled to Mass Spectrometry). The SEC-LC/MS approach is a tool to perform affinity selection mass spectrometry (ASMS), which is a high-throughput screening (HTS) technique for drug discovery. It enables rapid screening of large collections of lead like compounds to identify ligands for a specific biomolecular target (proteins or RNAs). This label free technology allows to test all possible binding sites at once. Mixtures of compounds (up to 600 lead like compounds per well) can be screened. Hit confirmation is performed with pure compound. Up to 50,000 lead like compounds (in mixture) can be screened per day and system​.

As well as being a HTS technique, SEC-MS is also used to compare small molecules binding over a same target. This can be performed by running either an affinity competition study generating AEC₅₀ values for binders compared to a reference compound, or an affinity ranking study to depict relative affinities for selected binders over a single target.