SILAF -- Efficient and inexpensive whole organism labeling!

We occasionally still hear (here? come one, brain) about Stable Isotopic Labeling (with) Amino (acids in cell) Culture (SILAC). Which is probably still considered by many to be the gold standard in proteomics quantification.

There is still a ton you can do with SILAC, but when you first start planning an experiment one of your first impressions will probably be

It ain't cheap. Particularly when you consider how long you have to feed these cells really expensive medium. Or feed really expensive labeled organisms to other organisms for whole organism SILAC labeling. 

Solution? Ditch the C for an F, you! 

This new study on SILAF demonstrates an elegant labeling method for C. elegans. Crap. That didn't work. A...nope.... Nothing works with drosophila. whole organism using fruit flies.

Important note that I didn't know until I read this. You should totally avoid heavy arginine labeling, anyway! Check the references.

This group uses heavy lysine food and digests with just LysC and gets fantastic efficient and much less expensive full integration into the fly. It looks to me like this can be applied to any other organism model. 

I was really going to use some Jeff Goldblum joke, but I'm still bummed about the nematode. Maybe later!