DNA The secret of Life
Excerpts from DNA The secret of Life by James D. Watson, Nobel prize winner Double Helix with Andrew Berry:
The most humbling aspect of the Human Genome Project so far has been the realization that we know remarkably little about what the vast majority of human genes do. To use the hard-won information properly requires us to devise methods for studying the function of genes on a genomewide scale. . .
Proteomics is the study of the proteins encoded by genes. Transcriptomics is devoted to determining where and when genes are expressed – that is, which genes are transcriptionally active in a given cell. If the genome is ultimately to be understood in its more dynamic reality, not as a mere set of instructions for life’s assembly but as the screenplay for life’s movie – all the drama described in the precise order it is meant to occur – then proteomics and transcriptomics provide the keys to glimpsing the live action. The more we learn, the more we see of Life, the Movie.
We have long appreciated that a protein is a great deal more in biological terms than the linear string of amino acids that compose it. How the string folds up to produce a distinctive three-dimensional configuration is really the key to its function – what proteomics seeks to know . . . Knowledge of a protein’s three-dimensional structure greatly assists the work of medical chemists in their hunt for new drugs that work, as many do, by inhibiting protein functioning . . .
All too often, however, the three dimensional structure itself provides no particular indication of that protein’s function. Important clues may come instead from studying how the mystery protein interacts with other known ones. A simple way to identify such interactions involves spotting out samples of a set of know proteins on a microscope slide and then dousing them with the mystery protein, which has been previously treated so it will fluoresce under UV light. Where our test protein “sticks” to a particular spot on the slide’s protein grid, it has become bound to the protein in that spot, causing it too to become fluorescent. Presumably, then, these two proteins are engineered to interact within the cell. . . .
To be continued
|
Threaded Mode