An award is made to the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) to support the purchase of an advanced mass spectrometry (MS) instrument. Mass spectrometry is used by researchers to catalogue and quantify many variants of the protein complement of an organism or organelle system and to measure other metabolites. Researchers at the ISB will extend their previous work with advanced detectors, software and lab protocols to improve protein and metabolite profiling in biological samples. Through training of researchers directly or attending expert courses given regularly at ISB, this project will enhance the teaching, training and learning by providing innovative tools to maintain the cutting-edge curriculum of these courses from PhD students, post-docs to experienced PIs. The ISB award-winning high school education program will also support inquiry-based teaching practices at the grassroots. Students and teachers of underrepresented groups will collaborate with scientists to bring current science concepts and practices into high school classrooms.
The new MS instrument will provide enhanced capabilities of comprehensive high-throughput discovery and targeted analyses, characterization of post-translational modifications, and protein interaction analysis. Using knowledge gained from previous research efforts, as well as computational tools for prediction and spectral interpretation, the ISB researchers will provide new insights into multiple biochemical events such as transcription/translation interplay, organelle biogenesis, metabolic network analysis, novel capture and quantitation reagent development and their applications. The new system will complement the computational expertise in proteomics hardware and software development capabilities among ISB researchers to advance many other projects. The use of data independent analysis (DIA) with this instrument and interrogation through new software tools for data analysis will provide users unprecedented capabilities in molecular ion identification and quantitation. Results from the studies will be published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at regional and national scientific meetings.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
