Project description:To address the delivery barriers of macromolecular therapeutics, we sought to develop high-throughput peptide barcoding platform as a homogeneous method for macromolecular screening. Implemented in open-source algorithms, BarcodeBabel and PeptideBabel, this approach permits the design of libraries of peptide barcodes and novel penetration sequences optimized for analysis by quantitative mass spectrometry.
Project description:Species identification of fragmentary bones remains a challenging task in archeology and forensics. A species identification method for such fragmentary bones that has recently attracted interest is the use of bone collagen proteins. We developed a method similar to DNA barcoding that reads collagen protein sequences in bone and automatically determines the species by performing sequence database searches. We tested our method using bone samples from 30 vertebrate species ranging from mammals to fish.
Project description:Chloroplast group IIA introns derive from bacterial ribozymes. Their splicing likely requires Maturase K (MatK), which has been largely inaccessible to functional analyses being itself a chloroplast intron-encoded protein. We show that MatK physically interacts with a conserved, essential plastid-localized homolog of starch branching enzymes (BEs), dubbed MATURASE K INTERACTING PROTEIN1 (MKIP1). We demonstrate that MKIP1 proteins have lost BE activity and acquired an insertion enabling direct interaction with the N-terminal region of MatK. Arabidopsis MKIP1 specifically co-precipitates all known intron targets of MatK. Induced MKIP1 silencing results in pale newly emerging leaves, in which the splicing of these intron targets is strongly reduced. Our data suggest that MKIP1 functionally diverged from canonical BEs to facilitate splicing in conjunction with MatK. We propose that the N-terminus of MatK, in turn, has evolved from an RNA-binding domain into a platform for protein interaction, helping its transition towards a general splicing factor.
Project description:By using DNA barcoding to trace individual cancer cells from the 4T1 murine model of cancer, we were able to identify two cancer cell clones that were highly immune evasive and resistant to immune destruction both by the endogenous immune system and when treating with immunotherapy. We isolated these clones (IE1 and IE2) from the bulk parental population for further characterisation. We wondered if copy number variations could explain the phenotype we observed, so we carried out WGS to investigate this.
