University of Texas researcher Edward Marcotte is neither a medical doctor nor a botanist. But using a computational algorithm, he found a connection between a disease causing deafness and a mustard plant that sometimes grows sideways. The same gene mutation causes both outcomes.

A computational algorithm is a kind of super-formula that sorts through massive sets of data to find problem-solving patterns. By focusing on proteins, which carry out the duties assigned to them by genes and are involved in almost all cell functions, Marcottes calculations have revealed numerous unlikely connections that are considered vital to understanding the inner workings of genetic diseases like cancer and heart disease.

Marcotte, 45, got his bachelors degree in molecular biology and a doctorate in biochemistry at UT, and describes his work in the chemistry and biochemistry department as basic biology. Marcotte likens himself to a kid turned loose on a playground to go exploring every day driven by all the potential discoveries just waiting to be found.

In fact, Marcotte could be considered something of an advertisement for the importance of pure as opposed to applied research. His objective, he says, is simply to understand what genes and proteins do. But its not so simple. Biologists are trying to figure out how genes work together and what each one does when its either active or inactive. These variations determine human biological characteristics, from eye color to the likelihood of developing a genetic disease.

Trying to find the tiny protein machines that make up cells and understanding those better should help with clinical research and applications, but thats not our goal, Marcotte said. Our goal is just to try to understand how cells work, to really figure out the parts to all these things.

For his work in that complicated arena, Marcotte was one of 10 scientists to win the National Institute of Healths 2012 Directors Pioneer Award. He and his research team at UT were awarded $3.85 million over the next five years to develop high-risk, high-reward technologies that would help scientists better interrogate the proteome, the set of proteins that serve as fingerprints for particular kinds of genes.

Ravi Basavappa, program director for the high-risk, high-reward research at the National Institute of Health said the technologies Marcotte proposed to develop have the clear potential to transform broad areas of biomedical science.

Such advanced work is now possible thanks to the worldwide effort to map the human genome, a project that took thousands of biologists, a billion dollars and most of the 1990s to accomplish. The process of reading a strand of DNA and revealing which genes are present and active can now be done by a machine that will sequence an entire genome, animal or vegetable, in about two days for $1,000.

Once you get the genome sequence, that tells you, in a way, the parts that an organism is capable of making and its particular version of those, Marcotte said.

The nearly 20,000 genes that make up the human genome serve as instructions on how to build proteins. Yet while biologists can now sequence a genome rapidly and with ease, they havent been able to look at a proteome, the entire set of proteins encoded by the genome, to the same degree.

Read more from the original source:
UT expert looks to new horizons in gene research

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