Protein Chemistry & Proteomics will introduce students to the chemistry of proteins and the current modern approaches for their structural and functional characterization. Mass spectrometry is an old technique long used for determining the masses of different small organic compounds in physics and chemistry, but until recently it had almost no applications in biology and/or biochemistry. In this course we will describe the proteins and analytical biochemistry- and protein chemistry-based approaches to characterize them. We will also describe mass spectrometry and its applications in biology and/or biochemistry to characterize individual proteins (protein identification and analysis of post-translational modifications), group of proteins (protein-protein interactions) or the whole proteome. Examples of proteomics approaches with medical significance for biomarker discovery, validation and monitoring will also be discussed.
The following topics will be covered during the semester:
Amino Acids, Peptides and Proteins.
Mass spectrometry (MS): principle, components and types of mass spectrometers
Protein identification using MALDI-MS
Protein identification using LC-MS/MS
Bioinformatics for data analysis in proteomics
Protein quantitation using mass spectrometry
Analysis of complex samples
Structural and functional characterization of proteins
Biomarker discovery, validation and monitoring using mass spectrometr