A post-processing approach to bacterial membrane proteomics!

This is a really nice new study that shows how some cool tools I didn't know about can be used to work out membrane proteomics in bacteria.

You'll have to check out the details on your own ;)

This starts out as a discovery run in bacterial spores from one of my favorite stinky organisms. They lyse the spores by boiling them and then do SDS-PAGE and gel extraction to get the peptides. They ID everything they can and then go to this cool thing!

You feed psortb your protein sequences -- and then it predicts where they came from in the cell!  A quick investigation into this tool shows that it uses biologically annotated data as well as the normal stuff (hydrophobicity and known conserved protein spanning motifs) -- from bacteria to make these predictions.

And...it totally works. This team identifies over 100 membrane proteins from this understudied pathogen and find a new protein that they can prove is involved in spore formation (by knocking it out!). And then overproduce the protein in E.coli to prove what compounds it is involved in making.

Seriously cool -- and counterintuitive (to me) -- approach that obviously works, for you microbiologists out there (who probably knew about all this anyway)!

(Go Hokies!)