Protein chips – or ‘protein arrays’ as they are more commonly known – are objects such as slides that have proteins attached to them and allow important scientific data about the behaviour of proteins to be gathered.

Imagine trying to figure out how your car’s power train works from just a few of its myriad components: It would be nearly impossible. Scientists have long faced a similar challenge in understanding cells’ tiny powerhouses — called “mitochondria” — from scant knowledge of their molecular parts.

The Nucleic Acid Programmable Protein Array (NAPPA) was developed at the Harvard Institute of Proteomics and led to the spin-out of Auguron about a year ago. The firm says this technology enables prot

For the first time, scientists have engineered yeast cells capable of producing a broad repertoire of recombinant therapeutic proteins with fully human sugar structures (glycosylation). These sugar structures ensure a glycoprotein’s biological activity and half-life and to date, have necessitated the expression of therapeutic glycoproteins in mammalian hosts.

Cells are like small cities. They contain all the necessary parts that allow their infrastructure, function, growth, and communication to operate. For over a century scientists have been looking at the structures and organelles in cells using microscopic methods, and then drawing conclusions about their function.

Researchers at the University of Toronto and the Hospital for Sick Children have recorded the most comprehensive and reliable map of protein interactions in a living organism to date, bringing science one step closer to deciphering and correcting disease-causing genetic instructions in humans and animals. The findings, which will be released in the March 30 issue [...]

Discoveries made during the first large-scale analysis of interactions between proteins in our cells hold promise for identifying new genes involved in genetic diseases, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins and the Institute of Bioinformatics (IOB) in Bangalore.The findings, reported in the March issue of Nature Genetics, were made using a database of more than [...]

In research that could significantly advance the pace of drug discovery in the fight against breast cancer, Harvard Medical School investigators announce in today’s online Journal of Proteome Research that they have created the first publicly available library of reliably expressible proteins of a human disease, in this case for breast cancer.Perhaps more significantly, these [...]

Researchers from Germany announce they have finished the first complete analysis of the “molecular machines” in one of biology’s most important model organisms: S. cerevisiae (baker’s yeast).The study combined a method of extracting complete protein complexes from cells (tandem affinity purification, developed in 2001 by Bertrand Séraphin at EMBL), mass spectrometry and bioinformatics to investigate [...]

A team of scientists at Yale University has completed the first comprehensive map of the proteins and kinase signaling network that controls how cells of higher organisms operate, according to a report this week in the journal Nature.The study is a breakthrough in understanding mechanisms of how proteins operate in different cell types under the [...]