Proteomes vs. Disease

Theo Luider and colleagues at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands have reported in the Journal of Proteome Research on the higher concentration of PZP (Pregnancy Zone Protein) in presymptomatic Alzheimer’s disease group of women.

Journal of Proteome Research paper

Vibralactone and ClpP1P2 complex

Stephan Sieber and co-workers at TU Munchen have reported in ACIEE on their studies with vibralactone to study a bacterial protein called ClpP.

ACIEE paper

Koranimine found using proteomics

Proteomics is the study of proteins in general – the weapons to attack this field is based on mass spec of course, which gives the investigator the sequence of the protein he/she is interested in studying.  Funny enough nature has made a bunch of proteins that are structurally related to each other through amino acid sequences and from the sequences one can make a database and group proteins together.  For example, one can use a known short sequence (let’s say five amino acids long) that can be searched throughout the database, which leads to the discovery of many other proteins that are related to the original protein that one may not have considered in the first place.  Neil Kelleher and co-workers at UIUC have reported in JACS on their isolation of a natural product, which was initially sought out from their identification of a protein in their database.  The initial isolation and mass spec run of a large protein – a non-ribosomal peptide synthetase (NRPS) – led them to identify sub-sequences, which resulted in amplification of this mystery protein by using primers in a PCR experiment.  Comparison of the amino acid sequence to their database of known protein sequences (GenBank) led them to understand that this was a pretty new sequence.  Ultimately, this new protein identification resulted in the isolation and structural determination of this brand new natural product, koranimine.

JACS paper