Proteomics of opportunity -- the myotendinous junction proteome!

 

A lot of science is about opportunity. One reason that I really really wanted to be where I am now is because there appears to be opportunity all over. There are institutions devoted to rare diseases all over this campus and places where maybe even a mediocre mass spectrometrist can do something good for the world if he/she tries really hard. 

I found this new study inspirational because this group had an opportunity and seized it fully. They turned tiny bits of material that is removed during the common ACL corrective surgery and produced a complete proteome of something non-MDs probably didn't know existed. 

So many sections and subsections and subtypes of subsections inside of us! As an aside, if you think that anatomy is super well understood, I ran samples for a guy a while back who discovered a new human organ that no one knew about until his team found it. No joke. It was a really big deal, even on mainstream media....and...well...they brought me some mouse brains...not the thing that is rapidly being drawn into anatomy textbooks with a sharpie. Meh.

Whatever this myotendinous thing is sounds like it is an absolute joy to work with as the team details how they had to crank the SDS concentration up 4x over other muscle tissues to get it to solubilize. They use an HF-X system and MaxQuant/Persues for the data analysis. Then they do stellar immunofluorescence to just drive home the point that this region is unique and that when we homogenize even tiny bits of tissue we're probably muddying tons of cool and unique biology. 

If you get an opportunity for access to something cool and unstudied, this is a great example of how to use it to bring science (and, in this case, medicine) forward!