These advances, coupled with Myriad's proven sequencing and informatics capabilities, produce an industrial-scale platform for elucidating protein pathways. This process involves breaking up each gene into its domains and using each domain as a bait to identify interacting proteins. Each interacting protein is itself broken into approximately 5-10 domains which are then used as baits for the next ProNet run. As it takes about 4 months to run one series of baits through ProNet, Myriad will explore each gene for 3 generations of interacting proteins in one year. The overall result would likely be 20 to 60 interacting proteins.
Some collaborators choose to pursue several such projects simultaneously.
Myriad has developed the capacity to conduct dozens of ProNet projects simultaneously. Specific ProNet data is continuously available to the collaborator's scientists through a secure, browser-based interface. Information from external sources, such as public sequences, published yeast two-hybrid protein interactions, and functional links, are also easily accessed from the interface. As an example of ProNet's deliverables for a current collaborator, Myriad has been able to double the world's knowledge of the genetics of dementia within a year through the use of ProNet. Shown in Figure 1 below are the actual first year results for one particular collaborative project.