Thursday, August 25, 2016

A researcher's guide to mass-spec based proteomics!


I can say with absolute certainty that I'm not the only person who considers the guy in the picture above to be kind of a personal hero. And not just because other people in that category occasionally send me pics like the one above late at night.

This new paper (Epub ahead of print as of early this AM) does an even better job of characterizing why. While the title might seem kinda dull, the topic of this paper centers on probably the most common conversation I have during my day job (3 times yesterday and twice with people with really impressive titles). That question is -- How do we translate the brilliant stuff mass spectrometrists are doing into what biologists care about?

Honestly, my entire career has been based on being kinda okay at both mass spec and biology and talking a LOT so this is dear to my heart.

How does this paper help?

WILEY DON'T SUE ME!! Please see disclaimer! I'll take it down, but I'm directing you traffic for free.

By breaking this stuff down to basics as shown in the picture above. How clear is that!??!

Is it the most original paper ever written? Nah... But it sure is approachable, extremely well-written, and breaks down a lot of this stuff to more palatable little blocks without leaning heavily on maths maybe us biologists weren't required to take. I highly recommend downloading this paper!

While I'm on this topic, I'm going to self-promote a little. I've prepared a seminar on something similar. You can call it a "Orbitrap physics for biologists day". It originally started as a way to maybe help collaborators or core lab customers at JHU to ask better questions, but has grown into something a little larger.


If you are on campus at the NIH, this is 2 metro stops up at Twinbrook lane. We're working on having the meeting recorded/telecasted and made available, but we don't have details yet.

If you are local and want to attend you can register for this meeting here. 

You bet I'll be stealing borrowing and fully citing some of the beautiful and concise illustrations and explanations from this new paper as improvements to this workshop material!




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