Snyder said the method of analyzing the transcription factors can be used for any organism and for any species including humans.
"The transcription factors we looked at in yeast have counterparts in humans," he said. About two-thirds of the yeast genes exhibit similarity to human genes. Applying the method developed for analyzing transcription factors in humans will prove to be powerful. Its a step towards understanding, for example, why a brain cell is a brain cell and how a muscle cell becomes a muscle cell.
Snyders laboratory has pioneered many new chip technologies. His laboratory has recently invented new protein chip technologies for analyzing hundreds to thousands of proteins simultaneously.
Protein chips are disposable arrays of microwells in silicone sheets placed on top of microscopic slides. The high density and small size of the wells allows for high throughput (a measure of rate of production) batch processing and simultaneous analysis of many individual samples. Only small amounts of protein are required.
In a study published in the November issue of Nature Genetics, Yale researchers overexpressed nearly all of the yeast protein kinase and analyzed them using 17 different substrates and protein chips. Protein kinases are key regulatory molecules that control many biological processes. They discovered many novel activities of the protein kinases that were not known previously.
"Our study identified a number of novel features of the pr
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Contact: Jacqueline Weaver
jacqueline.weaver@yale.edu
203-432-8555
Yale University
25-Jan-2001