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Articles tagged: metaproteomics
Paleoproteomics
Paleoproteomics is a growing application area for mass spectrometry. Its cross-disciplinary remit includes analysis of ancient proteins (bone, skin, silk), ancient proteomes (enamel, egg shells, plant seeds) and most ambitiously ancient metaproteomes (dental calculus, food remains). The recent review by Warinner et al. in Chemical Reviews has excellent coverage not just of the varied applications but also the sample processing [...]
How much cashmere is in this sweater?
Textiles made from luxurious animal hair like cashmere and angora can fetch a high price. Bloomberg reported that cashmere garments alone were worth $1.4 billion in global exports in 2016. Big money attracts fraudsters, and sometimes products claiming to be cashmere could be something else, like rat fur. In this context, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has recently standardised [...]
Unipept and Mascot
Drawing conclusions from protein-level data is complicated in environmental and metaproteomics studies, where the sample is a mixture of hundreds or thousands of proteomes. The Unipept database is a useful, complementary resource for interrogating metaproteomics data and can be used in conjunction with Mascot’s protein inference. Human gut example Identify proteins by more than ‘gut’ feeling discussed analysing a human [...]
Identify proteins by more than ‘gut’ feeling
Last month, we discussed benchmarking protein inference and the role of shared peptide matches. Excluding shared matches may be beneficial to protein identification accuracy if the sequence database contains perfect representations of all proteins in the sample. Many real-life data sets don’t meet this condition. Metaproteomics and environmental samples, such as the various human body sites, peat bog and ocean [...]