Iterative Focused Screening with Biological Fingerprints Identifies Selective Asc-1 Inhibitors Distinct from Traditional High Throughput Screening

N-methyl-d-aspartate receptors (NMDARs) mediate glutamatergic signaling that is critical to cognitive processes in the central nervous system, and NMDAR hypofunction is thought to contribute to cognitive impairment observed in both schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. One approach to enhance the function of NMDAR is to increase the concentration of an NMDAR coagonist, such as glycine or d-serine, in the synaptic cleft. Inhibition of alanine–serine–cysteine transporter-1 (Asc-1), the primary transporter of d-serine, is attractive because the transporter is localized to neurons in brain regions critical to cognitive function, including the hippocampus and cortical layers III and IV, and is colocalized with d-serine and NMDARs. To identify novel Asc-1 inhibitors, two different screening approaches were performed with whole-cell amino acid uptake in heterologous cells stably expressing human Asc-1: (1) a high-throughput screen (HTS) of 3 M compounds measuring 35S l-cysteine uptake into cells attached to sci...