YEAST CELLS BRIM WITH MACHINERY

ITS CHALLENGING ENOUGH TO elucidate the structure and function of a single protein in a cell, yet proteomics researchers are wielding a bevy of high-throughput analytic tools and computational methods that provide group snapshots of the thousands of proteins that simultaneously carry out life's activities. A team of 32 academic and industry scientists in Germany has now shown how 2,760 proteins in budding yeast cells assemble into 491 complexes, 257 of which had not been identified before ( Nature , published online Jan. 22, dx.doi. org/10.1038/nature04532). "It's a bit like human society," suggests Gitte Neubauer, one of the researchers from a Heidelberg subsidiary of the drug discovery company Cellzome. "People come together in different groupings to fill particular functions," she says. For their vast survey of yeast proteins, Neubauer and her Cellzome colleagues teamed with researchers at the Heidelberg unit of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. The researchers were able to extract, purify, ...