A group of scientists in Bangalore, working with a team of American experts have found
a brand new way to identify new genes responsible for genetic diseases.
They have just completed the largest study of protein-protein interactions in human cells that was ever conducted. They claim it helps to identify these new genes and disease targets.
The discoveries, published in the March issue of Nature Genetics are based on 25,000
protein-protein interactions collected by the team at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in the United States and the Institute of Bio-informatics (IOB) in Bangalore.
"It is the most detailed study yet describing the interplay of proteins that occur in cells during health and disease," stated Akhilesh Pandey, senior author and an assistant professor The Johns Hopkins University (JHU) School of Medicine.
Pandey is also involved in actions of IOB — he is a scientific adviser of this nonprofit research institute that he founded in 2002. "Genes are the blueprints for proteins, but proteins are where the action is in human life and health," Pandey said to PTI.
"The ability to find links between sets of proteins involved in different genetic disorders offers a novel approach for more rapidly identifying new candidate genes involved in human diseases," he noted.
The conceptual advance of the group was made thanks to the comparison of almost 25,000 human, 16,000 yeast, 5,500 worm, and 25,000 fly protein-protein interactions.
This allowed Pandey’s team to detect 36 completely new protein-protein interactions. Much of the team’s work was based on data compiled from published literature.
"Our demonstration that a proteins importance is not based on the number of interactions it has with other proteins is an important conceptual breakthrough," Pandey stated. It proved that present rapid-testing methods of detecting protein interactions are prone to miss true interactions, he noted.
