Map of Human Protein Interactions Created
Full ORF (open reading frame) clones of RZPD (German Resource Center for Genome Research) have been made available to scientists at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch as part of a study of human protein interactions.
In the course of the study the researchers determined which proteins interact with one another. The conclusion of the study, which is published in the current edition of “Cell” (Stelzl et al., Cell 2005;122(6):957-68), is presented as the most comprehensive map of human protein interactions in international research currently available – showing 3,186 interactions between 1,705 human proteins.
Among them are 531 previously unknown interactions involving 195 disease proteins highly relevant for medical research.
“Functional biology is basically about interactions of proteins that carry out their tasks in concert”, explains Prof. Erich Wanker, who directed the study.
“Making a large interaction network for human proteins available will be, we hope, a major contribution to basic biological research and also a resource for disease studies and drug target identi.cation.”
“For any high throughput project with recombinant proteins, one needs reliable clone resources. We used RZPDs veri.ed Full ORF clones and were able to work fast and ef.ciently with high con.dence results.”
“We will use them again in future functional proteomics and structural biology projects.”
The extensive studies on human protein-protein interactions were carried out with special technology: the automated yeast two-hybrid system (Y2H).
In this method, yeast cells are employed to identify the binding partners of proteins. Full ORF clones provided by the RZPD German Resource Center for Genome Research are of high quality – they are sequenced to an error rate of <1/10,000.
The sequences are publicly available with Genbank and RZPD. Moreover the ORF clones are fully annotated, including potential amino acid exchanges and are compared to public reference sequences.
“The high quality and coverage of human Open Reading Frame Clone Collection provided by the RZPD is central for the systematic analysis of the human proteome,” explains Prof. Hans Lehrach, Director of the Department of Vertebrate Genomics at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Berlin.
“Besides analysing networks of human proteins, the information and data generated within the platform are indispensable preconditions for the next step in understanding of biology in a systematic context.”
“RZPD’s potential to supply expression clones in many different vectors greatly supports studies on protein function in a variety of ways without repeating the initial cloning and clone validation steps.”
“This reduces the possibility of errors and inconsistencies between studies, and more importantly accelerates research.”
“We are proud to participate in the large scale protein interactions study that lays ground for a wide variety of future work in basic and applied science in proteomics,” says Dr. Bernhard Korn, Head of R&D at RZPD.
“This supports RZPD’s strategy to develop resources on a whole genome scale according to the highest standards, and provide these materials to the community without reach-through limitations.”
The clone resource allocated by RZPD is available in the .exible Gateway system. RZPD offers full ORF protein expression clones for bacteria, yeast, baculovirus and mammalian systems. Expression clones with fusion tags are also available from RZPD.
