Protein fingerprinting made easy by Croatian scientists
Being directly responsible for a great majority of processes in living cells, proteins are the most important class of biological molecules. They are literally ‘molecular machines’ which facilitate the import of nutrients into the cell and expulsion of waste products from it, production of energy and transportation of material within the cell, as well as cellular respiration and mechanical motion. Due to their immense importance, proteins are among the most vigorously studied topics in biology today.
Over half a million different protein species have been identified in humans, each of them related to particular types of human cells. Different tissues, such as muscles, bones, nerves or skin, are distinguished by the unique ‘protein fingerprint’ – the specific relative abundance of different proteins contained in their cells. Moreover, pathological changes in any type of tissue necessarily have an impact on the tissue’s protein composition, and therefore protein fingerprinting can be used for early diagnostics and identification of various diseases such as tumors or infections.
Unfortunately, producing a good quality protein fingerprint has until now been a complicated, time consuming and expensive enterprise. However, based on their research of tumors conducted on horseradish plant tissue, the Croatian team proposed a novel approach to bypass this obstacle. Applying computational methods of artificial intelligence, they ‘trained’ a computer to precisely extract the most relevant information on the protein fingerprint from rather ‘fuzzy’ experimental data obtained by 1D protein electrophoresis, a well known, simple, quick and cheap experimental method of molecular biology. Their result hence opens up the possibility for development of a cheap, convenient and reliable method for producing good quality protein fingerprints.
Media Contact
More Information:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/117352689/ABSTRACTAll latest news from the category: Information Technology
Here you can find a summary of innovations in the fields of information and data processing and up-to-date developments on IT equipment and hardware.
This area covers topics such as IT services, IT architectures, IT management and telecommunications.
Newest articles
Superradiant atoms could push the boundaries of how precisely time can be measured
Superradiant atoms can help us measure time more precisely than ever. In a new study, researchers from the University of Copenhagen present a new method for measuring the time interval,…
Ion thermoelectric conversion devices for near room temperature
The electrode sheet of the thermoelectric device consists of ionic hydrogel, which is sandwiched between the electrodes to form, and the Prussian blue on the electrode undergoes a redox reaction…
Zap Energy achieves 37-million-degree temperatures in a compact device
New publication reports record electron temperatures for a small-scale, sheared-flow-stabilized Z-pinch fusion device. In the nine decades since humans first produced fusion reactions, only a few fusion technologies have demonstrated…