Results: Wetlab

Approach

Our experimental approach can be summarized as follows:

1. 1. Organisms and surface proteins selection

2. 2. Surface protein amplification and cloning

3. 3. Yeast two-hybrid assay with an existing peptide library

4. 4. Peptide functionalization

Results summary

We chose the five fungi Aspergillus fumigatus, A. nidulans, Candida glabrata, C. albicans and Saccharomyces cerevisiae as well as the parasite Toxoplasma gondii for our project. In the first step, we amplified all in all 35 different genes encoding surface proteins of the mentioned organisms in a standard PCR reaction (compare table 1). We were able to transform 20 of our 35 genes into a so called bait vector (contains a DNA-binding domain) and performed the Yeast-Two-Hybrid (Y2H) screening with them. Thereby, we accomplished to find more than 3000 probable interaction partners for our surface proteins.

Table 1| Selected surface proteins and the corresponding organism.