The point (sorry, but Ringo is not here)...

I have finally found out the point of what we are doing. It's about time. Until now, I have been doing a whole series of processes without really knowing how they relate to each other, or their end purpose.

We are both a "Core Services" lab and a "Research and Development" lab. Core Services mean that scientists around the country can hire us to do experiments for them. The R&D bit means that we aim to design new technologies and techniques for understanding proteomics. Most labs are one or the other. Both together though works very well. This means that scientists can work with us to design an experiment that will create a new technique or give new understanding in an area.

Apparently, the project that AB and I are working on has immediate applications in cancer chemotherapy. One of the problems of chemotherapy is the toxicity of it. One of the reasons for this is that chemotherapy affects how cells reproduce (at a DNA level). Many chemotherapies, in addition to targeting cancerous cells/reproductions, also inadvertently target the DNA repair mechanism in healthy cells. In a normal healthy cell there is an RNA protein machine that repairs nicks in the DNA. It sort of slides along the chromatin and unzips it in places that need to be repaired. The chemotherapy, however, causes this unzipping to get stuck. The RNA protein machine then sort of tacks on the end of the DNA. If this happens only a couple of times, generally the cell can survive (and this does happen occasionally in healthy cells to no detriment). Unfortunately, if it is continued, it is toxic to the cell. Thus one of the reasons of chemotherapy toxicity. We are looking at interactions of a particular protein with this RNA protein machine. It seems that in vivo (in the actual cell), this protein that we are studying will actually cleave the RNA protein machine off the end of the DNA allowing the DNA to return to normal functioning. If this turns out to always be the case, this protein could be infused with the normal chemotherapy for a cocktail that will reverse the damage that chemotherapy causes.

Here's the thing. I don't believe that it is that simple. It is amazingly difficult to study protein interactions that involve more than say three proteins (and even that many is pretty difficult). While it may be true that the protein that we are studying may be part of this interaction, there is no telling yet whether it is directly responsible for those results. Even so, it's some pretty cool revolutionary stuff.