Want to learn a lot about coffee this morning and see some classic proteomics techniques put to good use?
Check out this new paper in Food Chem (Elsevier)
The idea? They dry coffee in different ways -- and some people have linked how they dry the coffee during processing to the quality of the coffee. Apparently, making coffee is really complicated.
So this group extracted proteins from coffee beans (btw, you need liquid N2 to extract peptides from coffee beans), did some 2D-gels and spot picked for an old MALDI-TOF to get to work on.
They find a couple dozen spots -- and can get a peptide or two from each spot for identification. Unsurprisingly they find some heat shock proteins are differentially regulated as well as a few other interesting proteins that make sense. Their next plan is to see if they can create model systems to tell if one (or more of these) are responsible for the taste difference.
I want to imagine this is how the taste test goes --- coffee supplemented with Hsp70:
Coffee supplemented with: "homologous protein to putative rMLC Termites like superfamily protein" (another big spot on the gels)
...and now we know which one it is!
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