Nature's blockbuster: The largest human protein interaction group was born

A large number of researchers have been involved in this work (Photo: Resources 1)what is a "protein intergroup"?We know that the human body is made up of billions of cellsIn each cell, there are countless proteins that maintain the cell's most basic physiological functionOver the past few decades, awareness of these proteins has made long-term progressGenomic, transcriptome, proteomic data lets us know which proteins are produced in different cells at different timesBut this is at best a "census form"Little is known about how these proteins workprotein interaction groups were able to answer these questions to some extentAs the name suggests, this provides a large amount of data on how proteins interact with each otherWe know how these proteins work to better understand their physiological functionscientists analyzed the interactions of about 17,500 human proteins (left)Proteins with similar patterns are divided into different groups (photo: Katja Luck et al.)"Since the mid-1990s, our team has believed that protein interaction groups can reveal the most basic characteristics of life," said Professor Marc Vidal of the Dana Faber Cancer Institute, one of the study's leadersIn addition, we can also know how viruses such as neo-coronavirus interact with human host proteins"
ten years of grinding a sword With the joint efforts of more than 80 scientists from the United States, Canada, Spain, Belgium, France, and Israel, these important messages were finally born How do protein interaction groups do? it's not easy to clarify all the interactions between proteins In the study, the scientists used a classic method, yeast double hybridization According to the latest understanding, there are about 17,500 genes in the human genome that encode proteins Scientists tested whether the proteins interacted in yeast If the two proteins do interact with each other, a special molecular switch is activated to allow yeast cells to start growing So scientists can determine whether the two proteins interact by simply observing whether yeast cells can grow this workload is not small In a single test round alone, there are 300 million (17,500 times 17,500) of different possibilities For accuracy, the researchers used three different yeast systems, and in each system, they repeated the experiment three times As a result, they have done about 3 billion individual tests! the work of the study is enormous (Photo: Source: Supplied) from the results of these experiments, researchers found about 53,000 more credible protein interactions involving more than 8,000 different proteins It is worth noting that most of these are new interactions that have never been discovered what's the point of this work? researchers point out that for most human proteins, we don't yet know exactly what they do Information about protein interactions allows us to speculate on some information about protein function -- if two different proteins are bound to similar proteins, they may have similar biological functions "We can use human protein intergrouping to predict the function of proteins," said Professor Frederick Roth, another study leader in fact, based on this work, researchers have produced a lot of insights For example, they found proteins that are involved in the process of procedural cell death, or the release of cell contents If these proteins go wrong, they can lead to disease the study found some tissue-specific protein networks (Photo: Source: Resources 1) more interesting is that if you combine protein interaction data with tissue-specific gene expression data, you can also find the protein networks needed during the development and maintenance of different tissues We can also know how the mutated proteins affect the networks it acts, leading to disease In these networks, we can also find a number of potential targets for the treatment of diseases postscript as the researchers say, this work fills some of the gaps that currently exist, better connecting the ghetto with the genome/proteomics Perhaps because of differences in yeast and humans, the researchers estimated that the work might cover only 2 to 11 percent of human protein interactions But even so, the current results are useful enough and have attracted more than 15,000 people to use them In the future, scientists will use new technologies to further expand the database's reach in order to provide valuable data for scientific research References: Luck, K., Kim, D., Lambourne, L et al A reference map of the human binary protein interactome Nature (2020) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2188-x world's largest map of protein connections holds clues to health and disease, Retrieved April 8, 2020, from https:// original title: Today's Nature Weight: The largest human protein intergrouping ever created