Projects

Proteins constitute the functional and structural foundation of living systems. Proteomics is the system-wide analysis of proteins; typically performed by mass spectrometry (MS) to identify 1000s of proteins in minute sample amounts. Modern mass spectrometers are powerful but sample preparation lacks far behind with regard to robustness and reproducibility. This project aims to study centrifugal microfluidic automation of sample preparation for the MS based analysis of proteolytic processing. Proteolysis is the enzyme-catalyzed cleavage of proteins into smaller fragments. Based on our experience in centrifugal microfluidics as well as in proteomics, we anticipate that centrifugal microfluidic automation will significantly enhance consistency of the complete analysis chain while at the same time minimizing sample consumption. We aim to employ centrifugal microfluidic sample processing to study key steps of proteolytic processing in clear cell renal cell cancer, using precious patient samples.