Human Proteonome Folding, Phase 2, рассчет структуры белков в человеческом теле Налаштування

[Rilian]

Human Proteome Folding Project
Phase 2

Официальные результаты проекта
Активные эксперименты
Human Microbiome Project - официальный сайт

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~rb133/wcg/thread_2010_03_10.html

Как присоединиться читайте в главном топике World Community Grid

Proteins are essential to living beings. Just about everything in the human body involves or is made out of proteins.

What are proteins?
Proteins are large molecules that are made of long chains of smaller molecules called amino acids. While there are only 20 different kinds of amino acids that make up all proteins, sometimes hundreds of them make up a single protein.

Adding to the complexity, proteins typically do not stay as long chains. As soon as the chain of amino acids is built, the chain folds and tangles up into a more compact and particular shape that lets it conduct specific and necessary functions within the human body.

Proteins fold because the different amino acids like to stick to each other following certain rules. Imagine that amino acids are pop-beads of 20 different colors. The pop-beads are sticky, but sticky in such a way that only certain combinations of colors can stick together. This makes the amino acid chains fold in a particular way that creates proteins that are useful to the human body. Human cells have mechanisms to help the proteins fold properly and, equally important, mechanisms to get rid of improperly folded proteins.

How do proteins relate to human genes?
The collection of all of the human genes is known as "the human genome." Depending on how the genes are counted, there are over 30,000 genes in the human genome. Each gene, which is a section of a long chain known as DNA, dictates how to build the chain of amino acids for one of the 30,000 proteins. In recent years, scientists were able to map the sequence for each human gene. This means that we now know the sequence of amino acids in all of the human proteins. Thus, the human genome is directly related to the "human proteome," the collection of all human proteins.

The protein mystery
While researchers have learned a great deal about the human proteome, the functions of most of the proteins remain a mystery. The genes do not reveal exactly how the proteins will fold into their final shape, which is critical because that determines what a protein can do and what other proteins it can connect to or interact with.

Proteins are like puzzle pieces. For example, muscle proteins connect to each other to form a muscle fiber. They join together in a specific manner because of their shape, as well as other factors relating to the shape.

Everything that goes on in cells and in the body is very specifically controlled by the shape of the proteins that do or do not let proteins interlock with other proteins. For example, the proteins of a virus or bacteria may have particular shapes that enable it to break through the cell membrane, allowing it to infect the cell.

The Human Proteome Folding Project
Знания структуры белков позволит ученым понять как белки выполняют свои биологические функции, а также как болезни блокируют белки от выполнения необходимых функций для поддержания здоровых клеток

The Human Proteome Folding Project will combine the power of millions of computers in a grid to help scientists understand how human proteins fold. The work to be done in this monumental task is shared across this grid, so that results can be achieved far sooner than would be possible with conventional supercomputers. With a greater understanding of protein structure, scientists can learn how diseases work and ultimately find cures for them.

When your grid agent is running, it is folding an amino acid chain in various ways and evaluating how well each folding follows the specific rules of how specific amino acids stick together or not. As computers try millions of ways to fold the chains, they attempt to fold the protein in the same way that it actually folds in the human body. The best shapes identified for each protein are returned to the scientists for further study.



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Це повідомлення відредагував Rilian: Feb 4 2011, 00:23

[Rilian]

Paper published in the journal Molecular Cell using Human Proteome Folding project results

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/about_us...o?articleId=204

Summary
A paper was published in the journal Molecular Cell, which used results from the Human Proteome Folding project in identifying proteins which regulate processes in human cells.

Paper Title:

“The mRNA-Bound Proteome and its Global Occupancy Profile on Protein-Coding Transcripts”

Lay Person Abstract:

The Bonneau lab at NYU collaborated with Markus Landthaler and colleagues from the Max Delbruch Center for Molecular Medicine, Berlin, contributing in an effort to discover and study novel RNA-binding proteins in the human proteome. These proteins play an important role in regulating activity in the cell. Some of the proteins have been implicated in diseases such as Alzheimer’s, muscular diseases, cancers and others. This information should help scientists in further understanding of disease processes, possibly leading to better treatments.

The Landthaler group at the MDC put together a landmark experiment for discovering RNA-binding proteins - a type of protein extremely important to human genetic systems. They then contacted the Bonneau lab for computational analysis. World Community Grid has provided predicted structures for a more complete structural landscape, contributing greatly to the analysis of human protein structure and function. This analysis allowed the Bonneau lab to verify experiment results from the Landthaler lab, lending confidence to their methods and providing data on RNA-binding proteins found via experimental methods. Furthermore, cutting-edge function prediction methods were developed and proved in this experiment, which will feature World Community Grid data in future publications.

Technical Abstract:

Protein-RNA interactions are fundamental to core biological processes, such as mRNA splicing, localization, degradation, and translation. We developed a photoreactive nucleotide-enhanced UV crosslinking and oligo(dT) purification approach to identify the mRNA-bound proteome using quantitative proteomics and to display the protein occupancy on mRNA transcripts by next-generation sequencing. Application to a human embryonic kidney cell line identified close to 800 proteins. To our knowledge, nearly one-third were not previously annotated as RNA binding, and about 15% were not predictable by computational methods to interact with RNA. Protein occupancy profiling provides a transcriptome-wide catalog of potential cis-regulatory regions on mammalian mRNAs and showed that large stretches in 3′ UTRs can be contacted by the mRNA-bound proteome, with numerous putative binding sites in regions harboring disease-associated nucleotide polymorphisms. Our observations indicate the presence of a large number of mRNA binders with diverse molecular functions participating in combinatorial posttranscriptional gene-expression networks.

Access to Paper:

To view the paper, please click here.