Monday, June 8, 2015

Just when you thought glycoproteomics couldn't get any more complicated....


..this study happens.

Well, maybe, I'm exaggerating. I think we're all getting a good feel for just how crazy complicated and essential our understanding of glycosylation is to biological processes.  But this is a great study to underline this fact as well as demonstrated (to me, at least) a different way of visualizing glycosylation

In the study they took mouse livers, enrich for glycosylations at the protein level,  digested everything and did dual stage HCD + product ion triggered ETD on an Orbitrap Velos.  The resulting data was searched with Protein Prospector using "an iterative searching strategy" described in this paper I haven't read (yet!).  Essentially it looks like they are doing a deltaM style search with a 2kDa modification window.  I'm assuming the iterative part is a data reduction step.  However, I'm thinking if I sucked it up and gave up the bandwidth I could pull this off with Byonic or ProsightPC.


The output is this crazy awesome histogram with glycosylation masses versus frequency.  What a nice way to summarize this data!

The paper goes further and they use some advanced versions of gene ontology stuff to figure out that the patterns of glycosylation are organelle and tissue specific. 


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