ABOVE: WELL-CONNECTED: These 240 interaction networks in human cells are 1.5 percent of those detected by this project to date. Proteins tagged with a peptide to aid purification (red) interact with partners (gray), and gray lines connect interacting pairs.
ED HUTTLIN, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL
To understand how cellular machinery functions, scientists have looked to an organism’s DNA. But genome sequence has not proven to be the complete instruction manual that researchers had hoped for.
“Now that we have hundreds of thousands of genome sequences, the new picture that emerges is confusing,” says Marc Vidal of Harvard Medical School. Genetic mutations do not always predict a cell’s function or an organism’s health. For Vidal and others, the major missing piece in cellular systems biology is the interactome: a map of all the protein interactions in a cell.
A dynamic network of protein complexes, large and small, helps to carry out genetic instructions. ...
