Organizational Principles of the Synapse Proteome: Genes to Super Complexes

Sunday, 16 February 2014
Crystal Ballroom A (Hyatt Regency Chicago)
Seth Grant , University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
The brain is the most complex organ, yet the molecular principles underlying its organisation are poorly understood. Transcriptome analysis provides insight into expressed proteins but offers no information on their higher-order assembly into multiprotein complexes and larger molecular machines. These protein assemblies confer sophisticated properties to organisms but their isolation from brain has been technically challenging. Here we describe new methods to characterize and isolate a large set of novel supercomplexes from brain and find they play an important role in a range of brain diseases. A striking feature is that the many mutations in schizophrenia and autism converge on the synaptic supercomplexes.