Award details

Instrumentation for rapid, high resolution proteomics

Reference	JEI09403
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Professor David O'Connor
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors	Professor Graham Langley
Institution	University of Southampton
Department	Centre for Biological Sciences
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	64,048
Status	Completed
Type	Research Grant
Start date	01/10/1998
End date	01/04/1999
Duration	6 months

Abstract

Biological research is entering a post-genomic era - a number of microbial genomes have already been sequenced and the entire human genome will be available in the next five to seven years. These projects suggest that as many as 50 percent of the genes in a particular organism may be novel, as indicated by the absence of homologues with known functions. It follows that a major challenge for the foreseeable future will be to establish if such genes are really expressed and if so, to define the biological functions of the encoded proteins. These studies will ultimately define the 'proteome', i.e. the complete set of expressed proteins specified by the genome. Present procedures for proteome analysis provide high resolution but are exceedingly slow, labour intensive and require relatively large amounts of biological sample. To circumvent these problems we are developing methods that combine capillary isoelectric focusing electrophoresis (CIEF) with electrospray ionisation mass spectrometry (ESI-MS). Our results to date establish that our on-line CIEF/ESI-MS procedure provides very rapid and efficient separations of protein mixtures and can be used with sub-picomole amounts of sample. However, to develop this technology rapidly we now need to dedicate a mass spectrometer to the project. Therefore, this application is to request support for a dedicated ESI-MS instrument and ancillary equipment to provide state-of-the-art facilities for rapid and high resolution proteomics. The proposed instrumentation will be of strategic importance for research in this area and it is therefore proposed to make it available to other researchers wishing to carry out proteome analysis.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Closed Committee - Biochemistry & Cell Biology (BCB)
Research Topics	X – not assigned to a current Research Topic
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	Joint Research Equipment Initiative 1997 (JE2) [1997]
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

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