Intracellular protein technology
This is an abstract
for a talk to be given at the
Fifth
Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology.
There will be a link from here to the full article when it is
available on the web.
The lab develops and uses rough-and-ready protein engineering
techniques to make complex protein constructions bound upstream
of reporter genes in living cells. We are using the resulting
intracellular protein machinery to assign function to genes.
Recently, we realized that we could describe relationships
between gene products detected by such machinery in
symbolic-logical terms, and used this symbolic-logical
description to guide construction of intracelluar protein
machinery that registers relatively complex relationships among
gene products. Cells that contain the protein-based intracellular
hardware to register such complex genetic relationships can
identify important subclasses of proteins, including natural and
synthetic proteins that recognize disease state mutant gene
products but not the healthy variants.
By performing logical operations on the phenotypic outputs of
cells that contain this hardware, we can distinguish among
different models of protein function in genetic networks. This
information is simple but often informative, and the fact that it
is obtained from self-replicating cells makes it possible for us
to plan to obtain it systematically from entire genomes.
Perhaps as significant for the purposes of this meeting, we
show that cells that register such relations can perform logical
operations on protein inputs, and thus that these cells may
constitute a first step toward the construction of inexpensive,
self-replicating (but slow) logical devices.
*Corresponding Address:
Roger Brent, Harvard Medical School, 50 Blossom Street, Boston,
Massachusetts 02114, email: [email protected]
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