Lab Expectations

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease marked by loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra. Mutations in the gene that encodes a ubiquitin ligase PARK2/Parkin are known to cause autosomal recessive forms of familial PD¹. Parkin plays a key role in mitochondrial homeostasis by regulating a specialized form of autophagy called mitophagy, the clearance of defective or damaged mitochondria by lysosomes².

How does altered mitochondrial homeostasis contribute to PD?

Advances in mass spectrometry instrumentation and sample handling methods have propelled proteomics and extended its utility for both basic biology and early drug development. Changes in protein abundance and post-translational modification state often reflect the activity of a novel therapeutic agent as well as the sensitivity/resistance of a biological system to treatment.

See a real life example of how PTMScan technology can facilitate translational discovery. In this short video we describe how CST not only identified a major driver of NSCLC, which can respond to an FDA approved drug, but went a step further and developed an antibody that can be used to test which patients might be candidates for treatment. All thanks to the power of simplified proteomics.

Part 1 gave an overview on mass spectrometry-based proteomics. Now it’s time to talk about how this strategy can be used to identify peptides with post-translational modifications (PTM) from a complex biological sample.

Whether your lab is well-versed and equipped to do Mass Spec analysis in-house or your lab has never considered setting up a proteomics experiment before, the Proteomics group at CST has a solution to help clear the way.  Click below to watch the video and learn more.

After sequencing of the human genome was complete, it was time to roll up our sleeves and get started on the daunting task of unraveling the complexity of the proteome. Thus the era of proteomics, the study of the function of all expressed proteins, was born. This task is especially complicated

Post Translational Modification: Antibody Enrichment for Mass Spectrometry-based Proteomics

Continuing our theme of simplifying proteomics we present a webinar featuring Matthew Stokes, Ph.D., principal scientist of the proteomics group here at Cell Signaling Technology and Christopher Rose, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research fellow in the Gygi Lab at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Stokes describes PTMScan^® technology, a method that uses antibodies to enrich specific post-translationally modified (PTM) peptides (e.g., phosphorylated, methylated, ubiquitinated etc) from a complex mixture prior to LC-MS/MS analysis. Dr. Rose demonstrates how, by combining PTMScan technology with isobaric labeling, specifically with tandem mass tags (TMTs), his lab quantified over 15,000 ubiquitination events in Bortezomib treated cells.

Part 1 and part 2 introduced mass spectrometry-based proteomic methods, like PTMScan^®, for the study of post-translational modifications (PTMs). In the final part of this series you can see how PTMScan can be applied in translational research.

Part 1 gave an overview on mass spectrometry-based proteomics. Now it’s time to talk about how this strategy can be used to identify peptides with post-translational modifications (PTM) from a complex biological sample.

After sequencing of the human genome was complete, it was time to roll up our sleeves and get started on the daunting task of unraveling the complexity of the proteome. Thus the era of proteomics, the study of the function of all expressed proteins, was born. This task is especially complicated because unlike the human genome, which is largely static in every cell, the proteome is different between say a liver cell and a brain cell, or between a healthy cell and a cancerous cell, or even between an individual cell at the different stages of development. To address this challenge the Human Proteome Project was founded. Its mission is to characterize all human genes by generating a map of the protein based molecular architecture of the body. In this way, it will become a resource to help elucidate the biological and molecular function of genes and facilitate the advanced diagnosis and treatment of disease.