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Laboratory of Protein Biosynthesis
Head of laboratory: Elena Alkalaeva (IMB, Moscow, Russia)
The goal of the project is to investigate experimentally the molecular
mechanism of the protein biosynthesis process. One of the most unclear stages of protein
synthesis in cells is translation termination. According to the newest results, many different
proteins are the participants of the termination stage. For instance, besides two “canonical”
and the well-known termination factors eRF1 and eRF3, in humans we have two others
interesting proteins important for termination, Dbp5 and PABP. These proteins have a wide
range of activities in the cells, the termination process is the additional one, but this
important activity is not investigated well. During the project, we plan to obtain a set of
mutant forms of these proteins and to test their activities in reconstructed system of protein
synthesis (so-called “cell-free translation system”). We suppose to use the variety of modern
methods of molecular biology, such as direct mutagenesis, cloning, recombinant proteins
expression in bacteria and others.