urochester

The University of Rochester labs involved in the Center for High-Throughput Structural Biology are located in the Center for Pediatric Biomedical Research in the MRBX building of the University of Rochester Medical Center, and they are affiliated with the Department of Pediatrics. Drs. Elizabeth Grayhack, Eric Phizicky, and Mark Dumont have extensive experience in the fields of yeast biology and biochemistry resulting from their research in the University's Department of Biochemistry & Biophysics and its Center for Pediatric Research. They have been involved in several genomic-scale projects to clone, express and purify proteins from E. coli as well as from the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

The Rochester labs are focusing on the development of technology for the use of Saccharomyces cerevisiae for the expression of proteins for crystal structural analysis, with emphasis on high-throughput production of yeast membrane proteins and yeast protein:protein complexes. Use of a eukaryotic organism such as yeast for expression of proteins is desirable because of the lack of solubility of a large fraction of eukaryotic proteins that are examined in E. coli, because many of the natural post-translational modifications are not found in E. coli but are found in yeast, and because yeast is simple and easy to grow and transform. Furthermore, yeast can be easily engineered to express modification enzymes as needed for the proper folding of a eukaryotic target protein, to remove unwanted proteases, and to introduce other desirable properties