Research

Proteins are a cell’s machinery and perform most functions within living organisms. Many illnesses and diseases are caused by problems that occur at the protein level and understanding what goes wrong at the protein level will help future disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Proteomics seeks to understand the role of proteins in living systems and begins with the systematic identification and quantitation of as many proteins as possible from a cell, tissue, organism, or biological community (e.g. a microbiome) or other sample. A goal of comprehensive proteomics is to measure all the proteins present in a sample, but this is currently not possible due to the complexity of the samples and limitations of measurement technologies. The factors that contribute to the complexity of proteomes are numerous while key factors that contribute to complexity include: the large number of proteins present in an organism at any point in time, protein concentrations changes with time, most proteins have numerous modification states, and the dynamic range of protein relative abundance is huge. We focus on the development of new microfluidic and nanofluidic systems to improve comprehensive proteome analysis for mass spectrometry (MS) based proteomics. A goal of our systems is to integrate sample preparation and separation into microfluidic/nanofluidic systems before introducing into the MS by electrospray ionization (ESI). Once fully developed, these systems will increase the number of proteins identified providing a more complete description of the proteome while increasing the speed and reproducibility.