Quantitative performance of O-Link with spike-ins in human plasma!

 

There is a lot to love in this short new preprint! 

Let's count them!

1) This uses a NIST reference material and uses a very standard analytical approach to tell if one of these "next gen" proteomics things actually has quantitative accuracy. 

As an aside - this is one way to approach the easy and obvious SomaScam experiment that I've been searching for and pleading for - for nearly a decade. 

The authors spiked in a some proteins into plasma and then used the O-Link assay and made sure that -in a complex matrices like a human plasma pool (wonders and wonders!!) the numbers make sense. 

2) And this is a big one - I have these data on my laptop right now. Because....

-the data is publicly available! On a proteomics data repository! This monumental accomplishment was performed using the PRIDE repository. You, too, can have these data right now! Click here! 

It's clear these authors use R/Tidy or some other format where they're comfortable with data in matrices rather than lists. If you're a list person, you'll have to pivot the lists. 

That doesn't seem like such a big deal, does it? PRIDE can accept these data and I bet they'll help you if you're challenged. This is absolutely critical as reviewers (and especially this one) is close to 0.00% tolerance right now with the "next gen" people. 

Important aside here that should get it's own post.

PRIDE could use your help. If you use the best proteomics data repository out there for free all the time, of if you just like science, please take 5 minutes and let PRIDE's funders know how important it is! 

You can fill out this survey here! 

3) O-Link appears to perform admirably in this test! What? Yes. This is really worth thinking about. The best I can tell this version of the technology measures a little over 1,000 proteins in plasma - and the spike ins work!! If you're on the fence between one of these technologies and the others - you should absolutely check this out.