A multinational team of scientists have sifted through cells of vastly different organisms, from amoebae to worms to mice to humans, to reveal how proteins fit together to build different cells and bodies.
This tour de force of protein science, a result of a collaboration between seven research groups from three countries, led by Professor Andrew Emili from the University of Toronto's Donnelly Centre and Professor Edward Marcotte from the University of Texas at Austin, uncovered tens of thousands of new protein interactions, accounting for about a quarter of all estimated protein contacts in a cell.
When even a single one of these interactions is lost it can lead to disease, and the map is already helping scientists spot individual proteins that could be at the root of complex human disorders.
Ref: Panorama of ancient metazoan macromolecular complexes. Nature (2015) | DOI: 10.1038/nature14877