Stephanie Bechtel, Angelika Duda, Christian Schmidt, Stefan Wiemann
A collaboration with Jeremy C. Simpson, Rainer Pepperkok (EMBL Heidelberg)

Among the greatest challenges facing biology today is the exploitation of huge amounts of genomic data, and their conversion into functional information about the proteins encoded. The German cDNA Consortium is providing high numbers of full-length cDNAs encoding novel proteins of completely unknown function. These cDNAs are utilized to generate an ORF resource that makes the proteins amenable to functional analysis.

As a first step towards their characterization we tag these with the green fluorescent protein (GFP), and examine the subcellular localizations of these fusion proteins in living cells (Simpson 2000, Simpson 2001, Pepperkok 2001). These data allow us to classify the proteins into subcellular groups, which determines the next step towards a detailed functional characterization.

We have thus far localized over 1,000 different proteins in living cells, employing 4,000 different expression constructs. The localization data in many cases are the first functional information for these proteins, helping to identify targets to be funnelled into functional cell-based assays and into the proteomics of the department. An ORF and protein-tracking database has been developed in collaboration with the bioinformatic team (Databases and data mining), which has since been expanded to a web-based database where bioinformatic and functional (e.g. localization) data are made public through the LIFEdb database (Bannasch 2004, Mehrle 2006).