Currently in press at MCP is a really cool project that makes amazing use of the Thermo(Pierce) kinase enrichment kits. This paper from Lisa Wolfe et al., represents the work of a group from several institutions and uses the kit to find the proteins that use ATP during the Mycobacterium tuberculosis life cycle. If you're unfamiliar with these kits, you should really check them out. What you get is this pure ATP or ADP that are tagged with biotin. You place these compounds into your experimental system and if, say, your drug treatment (as I've used it) , causes a whole lot of kinase action then the respective tag that you used will be integrated into the binding site of the protein. You then have a permanently tagged protein that you can pull down and implicate in the function you are studying. They can be a little tricky to optimize. This is a high level experiment, but to have your kinases enriched and to know that they are active can give you more information than just about any other experiment. The application of these kits is pretty much up to your imagination and your biological system.
I stole the picture above from the PierceNet website, but you can find more information here. If you are interested in tuberculosis or in a great way to apply this technology, you should definitely check out this paper!
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