Professor Blagoy Blagoev receives funding for exciting proteomics project
01.05.2018
Proteins are the cell’s workhorses and each protein type has its particular job to fulfill. The effectivity is not only based on protein abundance, as proteins can be turned on or off, or moved around the cell, depending on what the cell needs. This is regulated by the so-called posttranslational modifications (PTMs), which are changes of the proteins, necessary for this fine-tuning of proteins activities and for the overall proper function of the cell. Not surprisingly, dysregulations of PTMs are often tightly associated with the pathologies of various human diseases and metabolic disorders. Today the characterization of the type of PTMs called ubiquitin and ubiquitin-like modifiers is at best imperfect, even incorrect at times, and the goal of Professor Blagoev’s project is to establish new and robust techniques to target exactly this problem. With the funding from the Independent Research Fund Denmark they will generate antibodies for the purification of proteins with these particular PTMs, and subsequently characterize the isolated proteins using a technique called quantitative mass spectrometry. This enables the research group to describe which proteins that are changed and where. Researchers from Blagoev’s group will then validate the effectiveness of the new techniques by describing the patterns for ubiquitin and ubiquitin-like protein modifications in a number of cell lines from different tissue origin.