engleski

Mass Spectrometry, clinical proteomics and bioinformatics as microbial crime fighters

Peptide mass fingerprinting is an analytical technique for protein identification developed in 1993. Since then, it emerged as a dominant method in proteomics, along with Edman Degradation. Generally, the method can be divided in two distinct parts, first part being accurate measurement of protein fragment masses with a mass spectrometer such as MALDI-TOF or ESI-TOF and second part which utilizes computer programs to compare these masses to either a database containing known protein sequences or even the genomes. Mass-spectrometry part has constantly been improved by onset of newer Mass Spectrometry devices with drastic improvements in accuracy. Computer program analysis part has been lagging behind. It’s not uncommon that a single proteome analysis capturing thousands of proteins gets done in several hours, while the computer based database search and protein identification part takes days. Today, when Mass-Spectrometry based proteomic assays are becoming standard to identify bacteria at the genus and species level in many clinical microbiology laboratories, it is prime time to find solutions which would bridge this gap between computer and spectrometer. In our lab, we are developing one such solution by replacing numerous unrelated single protein searches with something we call a “suspect species fingerprint”.

Mass spectrometry ; species fingerprint ; clinical proteomics ; microbial identification

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