Top-down proteomics of....skinned...human....wait. what?

 

Ummm....

Wish I'd seen this before US HUPO, because I clearly had an opportunity to ask some questions this week of the PI! 

(This wasn't me getting mugged for the 3rd time in my life, I'm just never sure what to do with my hands.)

Silliness aside this is a really cool top down proteomics study of proteins extracted from single muscle cells (which can be a lot of material...sometimes these are 10x or 100x the size of the typical human cell) but top-down of a single cell of any size is still super cool.

And there is bigtime variability across single skinned cells across a single donor. This illustrates what a daunting task single...anything... still is. 

Analysis was surprisingly done with a standard Q-TOF (Bruker Impact II) where I definitely expected the use of an FTICR. Protein separation was on a C4 column. Even more suprising, data analysis appears to have been done in Compass Data Analysis rather than the excellent MASH Suite toolkit that you can get from the lab website of these authors. I have never tried this sort of analysis in MASH but it probably doesn't have something in it (yet?) to do this, because MASH is a far better software than Data Analysis.