Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Have we exceeded all other techniques in quantitative accuracy?


This is a really interesting article Alexis found in BioEssays.  And it got me to philosophizing.  Where are we these days as a field?  We've come pretty far, for sure!  But are we at a point where we can beat the other techniques out there?

For example:

Do we trust an LC-MS obtained quantitative value
or
One obtained by horse radish peroxidase stuck so some stuff from mouse blood
or
Densitometry of a gel band stained with silver
or
A hand plotted enzyme kinetics curve where the slope is calculated as the limit appraoching something or other?

This essay takes into account the measurements of protein counts per cell via various techniques and then compares them to the values obtained by mass spectrometers.  Is it time to readjust the values in our text books?  Even if the mass spec says that they're off by a log value compared to these other assays?

Worth a thought!  If you're interested, you can check out this article here.

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