Biological fingerprinting analysis of interaction between taxoids in Taxus and microtubule protein by microdialysis coupled, with high-performance liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry for screening antimicrotubule agents

Some natural products, such as traditional Chinese medicines(TCMs), contain compounds with anticancer activity and have attracted a great interest in recent years as alternative anticancer therapies. A quick and convenient assay for screening antimicrotubule compounds in which in vitro microdialysis/high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is used to monitor the binding of the compounds extracted from TCM Taxus cuspidata Siebold & Zucc(Taxus) to microtubules is reported. It was observed that the extract of Taxus contains at least five compounds which have affinity interaction with microtubules by biological fingerprinting analysis, and they were identified as the taxoids of taxol, baccatin III, 10-deacetylbaccatin III(10-DAB), cephalomannine and 7-epi-10-deacetyltaxol (7-epi-10-DAT) based on the comparison of their high-performance liquid chromatographic/mass spectrometric and UV spectra with those of the standard samples, both assembly-promoting and disassembly-inhibiting characteristics of those compounds were evaluated. It was observed that baccatin Ill and 10-DAB bound to microtubules and the binding degrees were influenced by GTP. Competitive binding behavior of taxol with other four taxoids to microtubules was also investigated