Fields, Stanley

The Fields laboratory is interested in developing technologies, especially those to analyze protein function. In the last decade, genome sequences have led to the prediction of large complements of proteins, ranging from a few thousand in bacterial species to more than 20,000 for humans and other mammalian species. However, the determination of protein function remains a difficult task. For many of our technology efforts, we use the unicellular eukaryote Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker's yeast) as the host organism for carrying out protein assays. Yeast has a small number of genes, is highly tractable for experimentation, and has been used to derive numerous sets of reagents and high-throughput data. We are using yeast to analyze protein-protein, DNA-protein and RNA-protein interactions, to identify substrates of ubiquitin E3 ligases, to profile metabolites, to examine chromosome conformation and chromatin structure, and to analyze transcription. We are also interested in other technologies to assay protein function in which we couple a protein-based assay to high throughput DNA sequencing by a next generation sequencer.