TAP - Protein interaction mapping

Coordinator:		Dr. Anne-Claude Gavin
Institution:		EMBL Heidelberg
Homepage:		www.embl.de/research/units/scb/gavin/index.html

Understanding cellular physiology, and indeed pathophysiology, depends on knowing the biochemical function of individual gene products and more importantly on how each individual product is integrated into the cellular machinery. Proteins interact with others to build up pathways that govern cellular functions. Knowledge of such interactions are inevitable in the study of cross-talk between cancer-relevant signalling pathways, i.e. signalling networks, as they are identified and quantitatively modelled in IG-CSG. However, despite much information has been assembled on the pathways and network components, this list is neither complete, even less is the connectivity between individual components and pathways known.
This subproject aims at establishing the protein complex map for candidate genes that will be selected based on the experiments performed in SP3 and on initial bioinformatic analysis and network reconstruction experiments (SPs 12 & 13). We will use a combination of TAP tagging and purification of protein complexes followed by an analysis of these complexes by LC-MS/MS as an unbiased approach to dissect the protein components of pathways relevant in IG-CSG.