NEW YORK, Sept. 20 - The Institute for Systems Biology of Seattle has received a grant for $828,500 from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust to acquire additional equipment for its proteomics efforts.
The ISB will use the grant to buy robotics workstations that prepare and process protein samples and mass spectrometers to measure them.
"The equipment this grant will provide will significantly enhance the institute's facility for high-throughput quantitative proteomics," Ruedi Aebersold, the head of the institute’s proteomics research and the developer of Isotope Coded Affinity Tag reagent system, said in a statement released Wednesday.
ICAT, which has been licensed by Applied Biosystems from the University of Washington, enables researchers to measure levels of proteins in solutions. The ISB said it would use the technologies purchased with the grant to help build new systems based on ICAT as well as other unnamed methods.
"The equipment will substantially further our speed and quality control of quantitative proteomics experiments and therefore enhance our ability to succeed in enabling major breakthroughs in medicine," said David Goodlett, director of the ISB’s high-throughput proteomics facility. "We are committed to maintaining high-throughput facilities and developing new technological platforms."
Based in Seattle the ISB is a private, non-profit institute established in 2000 and dedicated to the study of systems biology, which attempts to understand complex biological interactions.
The M.J. Charitable Trust of Vancouver, Wash., was created in 1975 by the will of the late Melvin J. Murdock, co-founder of Tektronix. Grants are generally given for education and scientific research.