Topic
Measurement of the protein content of cells and tissues, largely by mass spectrometry matched against reference sequence databases.
Vamsi Mootha's team mapped mitochondrial proteins in six organisms and found 33 families conserved in eukaryotic pathogens but absent in humans. The families are candidate drug targets, and the same data have stirred a debate over the origin of the mitochondrion.
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Northwestern and Buck Institute researchers found structure, metabolism and immune proteins still shifting in the ovaries of 28 postmenopausal women. The authors say later studies need larger, more diverse cohorts and longitudinal health data.
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MassNet's authors assembled 1.5 billion tandem mass spectra from 35 species and report a model that gains 38 to 144% on human Astral data. Because the model is new too, the corpus's own share of that gain is not yet separated out.
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Mass spectrometry of ovaries from 28 postmenopausal women found protein profiles that differ across three age bands, researchers report in Aging Cell. The bone and brain link is the authors' belief; the firmer signal is in proteins previously tied to ovarian cancer.
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University of Delaware researchers report in Plant Physiology a validated way to digest proteins inside intact plant cells. In tobacco leaves, the data showed distinct protein differences between disease-causing and harmless fungi.
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Broad Institute-led researchers have catalogued mitochondrial proteins in one plant and five human parasites across nine papers in Cell and related journals. Parasite proteins that human mitochondria lack give neglected tropical disease programs a first list of candidate drug targets to test.
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A Baylor College of Medicine team used a structure-prediction workflow called GluePlex to find where a molecular glue grips the protein VAV1 before any experiment showed it. A separate group later reached the same conclusion in the lab.
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The six clocks agreeing matters more than the years they report, because a drug that quiets an inflamed lung moves the same blood proteins whether or not it slows ageing anywhere else.
Perspective Coverage
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Heidelberg and Freiburg researchers report that the enzyme ICP55 trims one amino acid from 107 imported mitochondrial proteins and keeps large complexes intact. The evidence comes from engineered human cells and a test tube, so the disease link the authors suggest is still untested.
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Standard gene models leave out short open reading frames, so a Salk team built a search database that includes them and pointed it at existing proteomics data from postmortem frontal cortex samples.
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The Blood paper counts 3,775 proteins in ultra-pure mature human red cells and reports a third of their physical interactions rearranging when oxygen falls, with the causal test run in animals missing part of Band 3.
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Duke researchers imaged whole mouse ovaries and report in eLife that the rete ovarii keeps three distinct regions into adulthood, with cell-secreted proteins in its tubes and nerve fibers connected to one of them.
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