A fundamental goal of systems biology is to define a biological system precisely, such that it becomes possible to predict the outcome of perturbing that system. Yesterday (Jan. 22) a team of researchers from German drug discovery firm Cellzome and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory linkurl:reported in __Nature__;http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature04532.html a significant step toward the creation of such models, at least in budding yeast. Giulio Superti-Furga and Robert Russell, and colleagues systematically tagged 6,466 __Saccharomyces cerevisiae__ ORFs at the C-terminus with a "tandem-affinity-purification"(TAP) tag. Of these, they were able to grow 3,206 proteins and purify 1,993 of them. They analyzed these proteins using mass spectrometry, identifying some 491 protein complexes, of which 257 are novel. This study fleshes out the budding yeast protein interaction map the team linkurl:first produced almost exactly four years ago;http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v415/n6868/abs/415141a.html -- especially membrane-associated proteins. The authors used a new protocol to improve their yield of "this notoriously more...
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