University of British Columbia Collaboration
Understanding how cells grow and divide is a fundamental question in biology. This complex and enigmatic process is referred to as the cell cycle. In order to progress successfully through the cell cycle, a wide variety of proteins must be synthesized and destroyed in a precise, and highly controlled, manner.
To better understand the relationship between protein synthesis, protein destruction, and progression through the cell cycle, the Aebersold laboratory at the ISB, and the Hieter laboratory at the University of British Columbia have embarked upon a major collaborative effort to identify and characterize changes in the yeast proteome (that is, the entire set of proteins expressed in a cell at a given time) throughout various stages of the cell cycle.
To this end, we are applying the isotope coded affinity tagging (ICAT) procedure, developed in Dr. Aebersold's laboratory, to a panel of mutant yeast strains generated in Dr. Hieter's laboratory that "stall" in particular stages of the cell cycle. In this way, we can identify and compare the population of proteins expressed at discrete points throughout the cell cycle, and thus identify proteins that are important for cell cycle progression.
These studies have important implications for many types of human disorders, including cancer, in which cells progress through the cell cycle in an uncontrolled manner, and Parkinson's disease, a condition in which brain cells are defective in the process of protein destruction.
McLaughlin Research Institute
Mad cow disease is unusual because it arises from a misfolded protein (disease prion) which catalyzes the conversion of normal prion proteins in the brain to the disease form and in so doing causes the degeneration of the brain. ISB´s President Dr. Leroy Hood together with Nobel-prize winner, Stanley Prusiner and others first sequenced and cloned the prion gene—work which led to our current understanding of the disease. The critical question today in mad cow disease is how to detect it. We need to be able to rapidly and accurately determine which cows in a herd are infected and which are not. Hence the key is to have a rapid, accurate, inexpensive, miniaturized and fully automated test that can easily handle hundreds if not thousands of samples. The Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) is currently working on a simple blood test for mad cow disease in collaboration with mad cow disease experts at the McLaughlin Research Institute in Great Falls, Montana. This simple blood diagnostic test will look at both proteins and mRNAs from the blood. Furthermore, the ISB is developing expertise in nanotechnology and microfluidics that will be applied to the automation and miniaturization of the mad cow diagnostic procedures.
|
home
