According to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, scientists have had a breakthrough in past efforts to develop a technique that can determine which proteins in a cell interact with each other.
Think of it as a Facebook for cells!
How so? Well, the mapping of these protein interactions (the sciencey term is “interactome”) lets scientists see what proteins are working together – opening up a wider understanding of specific roles of said proteins.
For example, if a little-known or newly-discovered protein interacts with other proteins involved in cellular muscle contraction, scientists can deduce the role of this new protein, and begin to learn more about muscle contraction at a microbiological level – including any associated diseases whose cause or treatment might have been previously unknown.
In essence, just how we can learn so much about other people based on how they communicate with others across social media platforms, so can scientists based on how proteins communicate.
This breakthrough in the mapping of these interactomes is significant in that previous technologies have been slower in producing actionable data, because the number of interactions that could be tested at once was limited.
“The power of this new approach is in the ability we now have to scale it up,” says senior author Joseph Ecker, professor and director of Salk’s Genomic Analysis Laboratory and investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “This assay has the potential to begin to address questions about fundamental biological interactions that we haven’t been able to address before.”
These studies, published on June 26 in Nature Methods, revealed more than 8,000 interactions among those proteins tested and provided incredible new insights on a cellular level. And even more importantly, this breakthrough sets up a pathway to test larger sets of proteins, providing even more insights into cellular activity that could lead to treatments and cures.
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