Cracking the plant-cell membrane code

Tuesday, March 23, 2010 - 10:21 in Biology & Nature

To engineer better, more productive crops and develop new drugs to combat disease, scientists look at how the sensor-laden membranes surrounding cells control nutrient and water uptake, secrete toxins, and interact with the environment and neighbouring cells to affect growth and development. Remarkably little is known about how proteins interact with these protective structures. With National Science Foundation funding, researchers at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Plant Biology are using the first high-throughput screen for any multicellular organism to pinpoint these interactions using the experimental plant Arabidopsis. They have analysed some 3.4 million potential protein/membrane interactions and have found 65,000 unique relationships. They made the preliminary data available today to the biological community by way of the Website www.associomics.org/search.php. Since proteins are similar in all organisms, the work is relevant to fields from farming to medicine...

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