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Scientists land the dough to study baker's yeast
17 Feb 2009
University of Manchester scientists have been awarded £3 million to analyse the entire protein content of 'baker's yeast' and further understanding of how living cells function.
Many proteins, that have counterparts in the human body such as cell cycle proteins and signalling proteins, were first discovered through the study of Saccharomyces cerevisiae - a species of budding yeast, thought to have been originally isolated on the skins of grapes. Commonly used in baking and brewing it shares the complex cell structure of both plants and animals and has become a model organism for scientists studying areas such as metabolism, neurodegenerative disease and ageing.
Scientists have worked for many years to catalogue the proteins present in the yeast cell, but have yet to establish precisely how many copies of each protein are present and how they interact with each other. If researchers can quantify cellular proteins they will be able to understand more fully how cells operate and why in some cases they fail to perform their 'normal' function in the body.
Proteins in the body participate in every process of a cell from the contraction of muscles to immune response. With this funding from the BBSRC, scientists at the Universities of Manchester and Liverpool are using the yeast cell to understand how proteins perform these complex functions by using new proteomic technology.
Dr Simon Hubbard, of Manchester's Faculty of Life Sciences, said: “This grant will enable us to track absolute protein concentrations in a cell on a global scale and allows us to build comprehensive models of cellular protein dynamics. Until recently we have only been able to do this at the intermediate RNA level, but proteins are the principal functional molecules in the cell, so this is a real step forwards.”
