M. HOLTUM, Søren Brunak, Matthias Mann; 2007
A major centre dedicated to protein research is to be built in Denmark thanks to the largest ever donation to Danish research. The Novo Nordisk Foundation, which owns various healthcare and biotechnology companies, this week announced that it would provide 600 million kroner (US$110 million) to fund the project at the University of Copenhagen. A core component of the new centre will be a high-throughput facility to express and purify proteins, determine their structure and investigate their properties. The centre will focus on human disease, and will seek to formulate proteins for preclinical tests if they look promising as therapeutics. The university will keep the project’s intellectual property, says vice-dean Birgitte Nauntofte. Just as the study of genes scaled up into genomics in the 1990s, so in recent years protein researchers have been upgrading to proteomics. It is a substantial challenge: genes can code for more than one protein, and the products described in genes can be modified after being translated into protein. This means that although the human genome contains some 25,000 protein-encoding genes, a given person’s various cells might use up to a million different proteins to do different things at different times in the course of a life. To crank up the complexity further, the proteins work in coordinated teams, requiring their relevant members to be in the right place at the right time if they are to generate the right response. ( Nature 447, 12-13 )
Xanya Sofra Weiss
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