Thermo Fisher announced this week that it would be supplying up to 100,000 synthetic peptides to the Institute for Systems Biology to aid ISB's ongoing effort to map the human proteome.
The project, known as the Human Proteome MRMAtlas, will use the Thermo Fisher peptides in identifying at least four proteotypic peptides for each human protein, which will allow researchers to develop selected-reaction monitoring and multiple-reaction monitoring mass spectrometry assays for each of the roughly 25,000 human proteins.
Thermo Fisher will also be providing ISB with its custom HeavyPeptide AQUA standards to enable researchers to measure the abundance of the natural peptides and to develop precise quantitative SRM/MRM assays.
Headed by Robert Moritz, associate professor and proteomics director at ISB, and Ruedi Aebersold, a professor of molecular systems biology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the University of Zurich, the project launched in October of last year with $2.7 million in direct funding provided under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and €2.7 million ($4.1 million) in funding from the European Research Council.
Thermo Fisher is the latest of several companies ISB has announced partnerships with as part of the MRMAtlas project. At the project's outset last year, ISB announced that it would be collaborating with Agilent, using the company's 6460 triple-quadrupole LC-MS/MS and 6530 quadrupole time-of-flight LC-MS platforms (PM 10/23/2009).
Earlier this month, OriGene Technologies announced it would be providing ISB with 5,000 full-length human proteins that researchers could analyze to complement the MRMAtlas work done with synthetic peptides (PM 5/14/2010).
Thermo Fisher is also collaborating with Michael MacCoss, assistant professor at the University of Washington's Department of Genome Sciences, on a similar MRM mass spec database. MacCoss is using the company's Pierce Human In Vitro Protein Expression kits to generate proteins for compiling the database and developing the MRM assays on Thermo Scientific TSQ Vantage machines. (PM 5/21/2010).