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WSU benefits from Michigan Proteome Consortium grant

The $11.9 million grant awarded to the Michigan Proteome Consortium from the National Center for Research Resources was good news for the Wayne State University node of the consortium and its director, Russell Finley, Ph.D. Although the consortium's main facilities are at the University of Michigan, the group was created as a partnership among U-M, WSU, Michigan State University and the Van Andel Research Institute through the Michigan Life Sciences Corridor in 2001. The five-year grant will be shared by the four institutions.

The group's overall objective is to identify proteins and understand what they do in living organisms. Dr. Finley is a WSU project director and associate professor in the Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics whose work focuses on technologies to identify and characterize protein networks In one project, funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute, his group is constructing interaction maps for the 14,000 proteins from the fruit fly, Drosophila. These network maps will provide information about specific pathways and functions of individual proteins.

The Proteome Consortium Web site is: http://www.proteomeconsortium.org.