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PROTEOMICS
Score another victory for high-throughput biology. In one fell swoop, researchers at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, have vastly extended decades' worth of research into the molecular communications between proteins that govern the lives of yeast cells. The Yale team, led by molecular biologist Michael Snyder, used glass chips arrayed with thousands of yeast proteins to track down the molecular targets of the organism's protein kinases, enzymes that modify the function of other proteins by tagging them with a phosphate group. About 160 interactions between specific yeast kinases and their targets had previously been identified; the chip study added more than 4000, allowing the Yale researchers to map out a complex signaling network within yeast cells. Snyder presented this large-scale survey of yeast protein phosphorylation last week in Arlington, Virginia, at the first annual symposium of the U.S. Human Proteome Organization.
"This is extremely important for the signal transduction community," says Charles...