The results, published in two papers in the October 16 issue of the journal Nature, provide the most comprehensive and detailed picture yet of protein activity in the living cells of higher organisms. They reveal a tremendous range in the amount of different proteins active in a cell and help explain the "logic" of the timing and regulation of gene activity.
Recognizing that it is the gene's products -- the proteins that interact to regulate all life processes, many researchers have begun to turn their attention from the roster of all the genes in an organism - the genome -- to the proteome. But while new technologies such as gene chips and whole genome sequencing have accelerated studies of the genome, the technology to study the whole proteome has lagged far behind.
Unlike genes, which all use the same code, each protein has unique physical properties, thwarting attempts to develop a single method to study them all in a living cell. By giving each protein a common tag, the UCSF scientists were able to follow where each protein acted and in what quantity.
With this new method for a thorough protein search, they were able to examine thousands of proteins individually -- one in each of thousands of different strains of the common baker's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, an organism that has proven to be a good model for understanding basic biology of human cells. About one third of the yeast's genes are shared by humans, and each yeast cell contains a nucleus and other basic organelles that function in humans cells.
By scrutinizing only one protein in eac
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Contact: Wallace Ravven
wravven@pubaff.ucsf.edu
415-502-1332
University of California - San Francisco
15-Oct-2003