“Proteins are the workers in the cell, and it’s important to know their shape,” says Chris Sander, PhD, director of Dana-Farber’s cBio Center in the Department of Data Sciences. Sander and his colleagues have now demonstrated a powerful “experimental evolution” method to discover details of protein shape and function, and the method may find uses across a very broad spectrum of biomedical research.
“This is a basic discovery in molecular evolutionary biology, with possible applications to cancer,” says Sander, professor of cell biology at Harvard Medical School and co-senior-author on a paper describing the work in the journal Cell Systems.
Among its potential applications, the “3Dseq” technique may aid in determining the three-dimensional structure of cancer-related proteins that haven’t been identified by alternative methods. The new technique also may help in understanding how oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes evolve in cancer, and in pinpointing which mutations in those genes contribute to disease progression.
