Minerva Biotechnologies is a nanoparticle company that has developed proprietary technology that enables high throughput proteomics. Without the development of new enabling technologies, sequential testing of every possible pair-wise interaction would require about a billion experiments. However, assuming about 40,000 proteins in the proteome and each might interact with five real binding partners, we really only need to identify 160,000 interacting pairs. We reasoned that if we could stably attach a protein to its encoding DMA, and if we could isolate interacting partners from non-interacting proteins, the problem of generating a proteome-wide 3-dimensional interaction map would be soluble. The proposal under review combines the power of yeast 2-hybrid with the accuracy of in vitro testing. This proposal describes a complete nanotechnology system that will enable the mapping of large protein interaction networks in massively parallel format.
