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COLLABORATION COULD HELP CHART THE PROTEIN UNIVERSE - 10/1/2003
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The billions of proteins that compose life on Earth remain one of the truly
uncharted territories in the biological universe, due mainly to the
slow and arduous techniques their exploration requires.
Now, a research partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison
and a Japanese university and company aims to develop a technology that
may allow scientists to map the shapes and structures of proteins more
easily than ever before. The advance promises to help unlock the inner
workings of hundreds or even thousands of proteins, according to
UW-Madison biochemistry professor John Markley, leading to a better
understanding of protein-based diseases, and providing fundamental new
information about the building blocks of all living beings, from
bacteria to plants to people.
An agreement signed this week by the UW-Madison's Center for Eukaryotic Structural Genomics (CESG),
the university's patent management agency the Wisconsin Alumni Research
Foundation (WARF), Ehime University in Matsuyama, Japan, and the
Japanese biotechnology company Cell-Free Sciences of Yokohama,
formalizes an ongoing collaboration between these groups to refine a
powerful new system, created in Japan, for making the large quantities
of purified protein that biochemists need to solve protein structures.
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