(Heidelberg) Scientists are calling it biology of the next generation, and a major step towards transforming information from genome projects into applications such as the discovery of new drugs. Today researchers from Heidelberg have announced the completion of a large-scale study of the molecular machines formed by nearly two thousand proteins in a living cell.
In a paper published in the current edition of Nature, a team of scientists from the biotechnology start-up company CellZome and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) describe the discovery of over a hundred new protein machines, ranging in size from two to eighty-three molecules, in bakers yeast.
Most things that happen in cells are directed by the activity of protein complexes, says Giulio Superti-Furga, scientific director of CellZome and head of a research group at EMBL. CellZome is housed in the new International Technology Transfer Center on EMBLs Heidelberg campus. These molecular machines play crucial roles in diseases as well as the everyday life of the cell. By analyzing the DNA sequences of human and other cells, genome projects have provided the complete instruction book by which cells create proteins. But this information doesnt tell when and where molecules will become active in cells, or how they will combine into machines any more than a list of the contents of a huge kitchen would explain how to cook or how to create a menu. The next task for biology is to decode the proteome, understanding the functions of molecules and charting their interactions, and Anne-Claude Gavin, Giulio Superti-Furga and their colleagues have now made a major step towards this goal.
Although researchers have known that proteins frequently carry out their tasks in large complexes, technical limitations have made it hard to capture and analyze them. But two years ago an E
'"/>
Contact: Giulio Superti-Furga
giulio.superti-furga@cellzome.com
49-6221-137-57-113
European Molecular Biology Laboratory
9-Jan-2002