I saw foxes and plasma in the title and I automatically assumed I knew one of the authors. I skimmed through and found that there were multiple seasonal proteins altered and thought that seemed pretty unlikely without extensive nanoparticle depletion. Those top proteins in blood plasma don't really seem to change all that much. Then I realized we weren't talking about blood plasma. We are talking about another plasma! Aha. That's a thing!
And it's a crab eating fox! I didn't know that was a thing either!
The method section is interesting, particularly the animal conditioning, but also the mass spectrometry! Proteins were separated by 1D gel and then analyzed by nanoLC into a Waters QTOF, perhaps the second one this week I've typed about that I'm not super familiar with. Data analysis was performed using Mascot with 1Da MS1 and MS/MS tolerance, which seems like kind of a lot, but - again - I don't know this instrument. I've seen people use these tolerances for data from the Stellar in preprints and Mascot knows what it's doing. Sometimes big mass tolerances help the downstream FDR stuff work better. I do really like the figures and while this fox is not considered at high risk for extinction, the last survey was done in 2015! I definitely think that all life on this planet has a higher risk of extinction today than it did in 2015...for...reasons..... so I'm glad they found the resources to do a study a mammal I'd never heard of!
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