Technology for engineering a phosphoprotein

Researchers at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA have used AB Sciex’s QTRAP technology to prove the validity of a new approach to synthesize phosphoproteins, which is expected to revolutionize the study of a wide variety of disesases.

By synthesizing phosphoproteins that can emulate natural or diseased states, the researchers were able to expand the genetic code of E.coli. They needed to build a custom assay to identify a single phosphopeptide in a complex mixture and required analytical capabilities that could accurately detect and confirm protein identification and sequencing. The AB Sciex QTRAP 5500 system enabled researchers to get significantly more quantitative information to verify the approach; streamline their workflow by combining qualitative and quantitative analyses and validate Yale’s advancement in synthetic biology.

“This breakthrough provides another order of magnitude of being able to understand biological processes and access new paths to drug discovery using mass spectrometry,” said Jesse Rinehart, PhD, Assistant Professor of Cellular and Molecular Physiology and Systems Biology Institute, Yale University.

Yale’s advancement in synthetic biology represents a new way to influence the behaviour of proteins, essentially turning these basic building blocks of biological functions on and off. The next project will be for researchers to create proteins known to be linked to cancer, type II diabetes and hypertension.

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