About Technology Centers for Networks and Pathways

What is a TCNP center?

These centers work together as a consortium to create new technologies for proteomics of dynamic systems with a high degree of quantitative, spatial, and temporal resolution.

They are unique among NIH proteomics centers because of:

1. a focus on DYNAMICS of protein interactions
2. emphasis on imaging and quantitative methods

The TCNP centers have five components:

1. creation of new technologies
2. collaboration with biomedical researchers through “driving biological projects”
3. creation of infrastructure to provide broad community access to these tools
4. training of students and the broader research community in use of these technologies
5. dissemination of tools, including the sharing of data and reagents, direct tech-transfer to other labs, and commercialization

What NIH program supports these centers?

This is a trans-NIH initiative. Five "National Technology Centers for Networks and Pathways" (TCNP) have been funded as part of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research for a period of five years. Two were funded in Sept 2004. Three were funded in Sept 2005.

Awards range between $12M and $17M over five years. The awards are being administered by the National Center for Research Resources, an NIH component that supports primary research to create and develop critical resources, models, and technologies. 

The centers are funded as cooperative agreements. Each center has an NIH Science Officer (see below) who helps to facilitate cooperation among the centers and with other programs.

The NIH Roadmap for Medical Research

Implementation Group: Building Blocks, Biological Pathways and Networks

Project Team: National Technology Centers for Networks and Pathways

Program Staff

Rationale for the Program

Limitations of proteomics technologies often force investigators to treat dynamic systems as either static or as binary options between static states. As with early photography, in current approaches to proteomics our subjects are long exposures, capturing broadly defined “images” such as “normal vs. diseased”, “the yeast interactome”, or “the nuclear pore complex.”  We are largely blind to the dynamics of systems we know cannot be static but which must be treated as such for the time being because of inadequate tools.  Transient interactions, or rapid changes in protein activity, location, or post-translational modification are like a bird flying through the frame of a carefully composed long exposure- invisible.

Complementary strategies, orthogonal to conventional proteomics, are necessary to take us to the next level, where the focus is on dynamics. The National Technology Centers for Networks and Pathways (TCNPs) create technologies to measure the dynamics of protein interactions, modifications, translocation, expression, and activity, and to do so with temporal, spatial, and quantitative resolution.  The program is intended to build a bridge between the quantitative and interactions domains, as well as breaking out of the artificially static view of complex systems.

The TCNPs cooperate in a networked national effort to develop instrumentation, biophysical methods, reagents, and infrastructure for temporal and spatial characterization of complex biochemical pathways and networks of interactions.  They collaborate with biomedical researchers through several mechanisms, providing a push-pull between technological advancement and biomedical problem solving.  The centers are also tasked with providing broad access to the technologies, methods, and reagents they develop, as well as providing appropriate interdisciplinary academic and peer training for biomedical researchers.

The scope of the dynamics problem is very broad. Each center integrates multiple approaches to create a coherent biological, analytical, and informatics strategy, but they focus on different technologies and systems, with corresponding strengths and weaknesses.  An important feature of the program is its strongly cooperative and interactive nature, which allows the centers to complement one another.