NSF Award
0703905
PI: Marc Vidal (Dana-Farber Cancer Center)<br/>CoPIs: Joseph Ecker (The Salk Institute for Biological Studies) and David Hill (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute)<br/><br/> For over half a century it has been conjectured that macromolecules form complex networks of functionally interacting components, and that the molecular mechanisms underlying most biological processes correspond to particular steady states adopted by such cellular networks. However, until recently, such systems-level theoretical conjectures remained largely unappreciated, mainly because of lack of supporting experimental data. <br/><br/>This project will develop a large-scale, high coverage protein-protein interaction or ''interactome'' map for plants that will provide a starting point for systems-level studies in plants. The recent completion of whole genome sequences for several plant species has revealed an enormous amount of conservation among their encoded proteins. This high level of conservation suggests that the development of proteome-wide maps using a few well-studied reference plant species is a cost effective approach to advance plant research as a whole. Importantly, this project is expected to have broad implications for research on economically important plant species that are more difficult to study. <br/><br/>Building on earlier work from the two participating laboratories, this project utilizes an existing set of cDNA-derived plant open-reading-frame (ORF) clones to construct a high-coverage ''plant interactome mapping resource''. A high quality plant protein interactome network map will be generated using two complementary approaches: an improved yeast 2-hybrid assay and a protein microarray-based approach. A set of ~12,000 Arabidopsis genes for which full-length protein-encoding ORFs have already been cloned and sequence validated will provide the scaffold of this project. In addition a set of 2,500 rice ORF clones targeted to two biological areas (plant innate immunity and kinase signal transduction pathways) will be used to expand the rice interactome network map <br/><br/><br/>The impact of this project will be in two broad areas. First, the completion of the proposed research will result in an important new resource for the plant biology community- a large-scale plant protein interactome map. The availability of increased amounts of protein interaction information should positively impact a variety of plant research endeavors such as the analysis of cellular metabolic network and other systems biology studies. Importantly, all of the interaction data, ORF clones, and DNA sequences will be made freely available to the research community through the project websites and through established plant databases such as Gramene and TAIR. The long-term impact of these enabling tools and technologies on agriculture is expected to be profound, providing fundamental knowledge for the construction of new plant varieties with superior agronomic traits. The project will provide training and participation of plant scientists in protein network studies through the annual ?ORFeome Meeting? conference/workshop. With respect to outreach, the project will also provide training opportunities for minority high school and undergraduate students as well as for middle and high school teachers.
