Needler -- Build an MRM for any/every human peptide?

 

I find this new preprint just a bit hard to follow, but I still think it is worth thinking about. 

What they did was take a sideways look at ProteomeTools and PROSIT and the healthy human tissue samples studied by some of the authors of those same tools. The question is whether you could leverage those materials to build SRMs (MRMs, which are the same thing, depending on what instrument you use) without ever having to buy standards and build a curve yourself. (Maybe that wasn't exactly the goal, but by the time my peptide standards come in I've often forgot why I ordered them in the first place, so I'm going to assume that was the goal). 

PROSIT does predict retention times, which is pretty important for SRMs and critical if you really want to target whatever you want from purely in silico method building. 

This is a lofty goal and one that might be hard to explain to people because this is where I'm fuzzy on the results. Again, totally worth thinking about, though, because how cool would it be to just have -- POW -- assay designed --> run it! 

You can check our Needler on Github here.