Protein Transduction.

Currently the methods employed to introduce proteins into cells are very imprecise and indirect. They involve introducing recombinant DNA and forcing expression and production of the protein by the cellular machinery. This process may be aborted at any stage and the final result is that protein production occurs in a minority of target cells at levels which are not optimal. However, even with these limitations the manipulation of protein expression through DNA vectors has led us to many insights as to how cells function in both normal and diseased states.

Protein transduction is a recently developed technique that enables proteins to be directly introduced into cells. The protein of interest can be "transduced" to any type of cell and will rapidly enter each cell so that every cell will contain an equivalent amount of transduced protein. The ability to precisely control the amount of protein within each cell makes this a powerful technique for characterization of proteins of unknown function and refining our understanding of known proteins.

Protein transduction will be a wonderful tool for the analysis of the data harvested by the Human Genome Project. The Genome Project will give us the sequences of our genes but will only yield hints as to their functions. Those sequences will be cloned and expressed as proteins in order to determine what purpose they serve. This technique also promises to be a powerful weapon in the treatment of disease and the proof of principle lies in application as an anti-HIV(AIDS) therapy. If this technique delivers on even a portion of its promise then it is likely that the laboratory of Steven F. Dowdy will win a Nobel Prize.

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