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About the PRCs

Caprion Proteomics Inc. (Caprion)

Biodefense Proteomics Research Center at Albert Einstein College of Medicine (Einstein)

The Harvard Institute of Proteomics (HIP)

Myriad Genetics, Inc. (Myriad)

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)

The Scripps Research Institute - FSPS (FSPS)

The University of Michigan (U-M)

About the Harvard Institute of Proteomics
Dr. Joshua LaBaer, PI

The Harvard Institute of Proteomics laboratory has significant experience in the high-throughput construction of Open Reading Frames (ORF) and cDNA clones. Recombinational cloning systems, including the GatewayTm and CreatorTm system, have been used to create these clones allowing the transfer of these sequencing into virtually any protein expression vector allowing users to employ them in the widest possible range of functional experiments. Large ORF collections have been constructed for several different organisms including human, yeast, mouse, prokaryotes, parasites and viruses. These include collections for: >500 human kinases, >1,000 human genes related to breast cancer, over 4,000 additional human genes. These have been fully sequence verified and distributed through TIGR, OpenBiosystems, the RZPD and PlasmID (http://plasmid.med.harvard.edu/PLASMID). Most relevant to this proposal, complete sequence-verified ORF collections of several pathogens including Francisella tularensis, Yersinia pestis, Vibrio cholerae and Bacillus anthracis have been successfully generated and are available to the scientific community.

Protein microarrays are a powerful technology for the high-throughput study of proteins and their functions. Through multiplexing and miniaturization, they enable the proteome-scale study of proteins for drug interactions, antibody screening, substrate identification, and protein-protein interactions. Scientists at the Harvard Institute of Proteomics have developed a novel method for producing protein microarrays called NAPPA (Nucleic Acid Programmable Protein Array) in which the genes encoding proteins are printed along with a specific protein capture agent and the proteins are subsequently synthesized in situ on the array surface at the time of use. This approach avoids many problems of printing proteins directly including the difficulty of purifying many proteins and the inherent shelf life that this would imply. Arrays corresponding to the entire proteomes for Vibrio cholerae and Bacillus anthracis have been produced (cholera) or are under development (anthracis). These arrays being probed with the serum from convalescent patients (i.e., immune responsive) in order to identify immunodominant responses. These will then be used to predict protein candidates for vaccine development.

In addition, novel approaches have been developed to study pathogen proteins that trigger innate immunity and conditional knock out strategies have been employed to study pathogen genes that are essential.

See the Biodefense Proteomics Catalog for the Harvard Institute of Proteomics' publicly available proteomic data.