Sunday, August 31, 2014

Need insanely deep coverage? Try fractional diagonal chromatography!


Told you guys I was going to get caught up on the literature again!  My day job hasn't been getting less nutso and I've been falling behind on the fun stuff I want to do.  Sometimes you have to pull a fun all-nighter backdating blog posts!

Anyway, this new paper in Open Proteomics shows us how to get EXTREMELY deep coverage of a sample.  Did you know there are over 450 known protein PTMs?!?!  Holy cow.  We need to stop thinking about just phosphorylations!  The problem is, these other 449 PTMs are also low abundance, but we don't yet have enrichment methodologies for all of them. What we need is extreme chromatography.


Our normal approaches for separation probably aren't going to cut it if we want true -omics coverage.  We're going to need combination approaches.  Separation at the top down level, followed by separation at the middle-down or bottom-up levels, as well as particular PTM enrichments.  If we are really going to be stepping into the domains of trying to track every PTM, we're going to need some extreme measures.  Definitely check out this paper here for a nice perspective on what we're dealing with and what strategies we currently have in place for going after weird PTMs.

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