Global Functional Atlas Of Escherichia Coli Encompassing Previously Uncharacterized Proteins

One goal of modern biology is to chart groups of proteins that act
together to perform biological processes via direct and indirect
interactions. Such
groupings are sometimes called functional modules. The types of protein
interaction within modules include physical interactions that generate
protein
complexes and biochemical associations that make up metabolic pathways.
Authors Andrew Emili and colleauges have combined proteomic and
bioinformatic
tools and used them to decipher a large number of protein interactions,
complexes and functional modules with high confidence. In addition,
exploring
the topology of the resulting interaction networks, they successfully
predicted specific biological roles for a number of proteins with
previously
unknown functions, and identified some potential drug targets. Although
their work is focused on E. coli, their phylogenetic projections suggest
that
a considerable fraction of observations and predictions can be
extrapolated to many other bacterial taxa. As all the data derived from
this study are
publicly available, others may build on our work for further
hypothesis-driven studies of gene function discovery.



Funding - This work was supported with grants from the Canadian Institutes
of Health Research (MOP-77639), the Ontario Research and Development
Challenge Fund, Genome Canada and the Ontario Genomics Institute to JFG
and AE, and from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of
Canada to AG and GM-H.



Competing interests statement - The authors declare that no competing
interests exist.



Citation:

"Global functional atlas of Escherichia coli encompassing previously uncharacterized proteins."
Hu P, Janga SC, Babu M, DГ­az-MejГ­a JJ, Butland G, et al. (2009)

PLoS Biol 7(4): e1000096. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000096

Source
Plos Biology