Tutorials and Information

Interpreting MS/MS Results

Join Proteome Software's Brian Searle on an illustrated tour about interpreting MS/MS peptide spectra.

Proteomics Interest Group at NIH

At this site you can hear the experts speak (turn on your PC's speakers) and see the slides that they presented to the NIH proteome research community. The archive has past seminars, symposiums, tutorials and lectures.

Isotopes and Mass Spectrometry

Atoms of carbon have isotopes of mass 12, 13, and 14 amu. Since proteins are made of carbon (and other atoms), the mass detected by the mass spectrometer for a protein depends upon the isotopes of the protein's atoms. You can learn what this means for protein identification in this IonSource tutorial. You can also develop a feel for isotopes by using Isotopica, Isotopident or an isotope calculator to work out examples.

Electrospray Ionization

This site is an introduction to electrospray (ESI) by a company that makes electrosprays.

MS Quantitation

Suppose you know what protein is in your sample. How can you measure how much of it there is? One method of measuring the amount of the protein uses a mass spectrometer and an internal standard. This tutorial from IonSource is aimed at mass spectrometrists. If you decide to do this, you can find peptides to use as internal standards at the Peptide Resource Page.

Antibodies tutorial

Antibodies are the gold standard in protein identification. An antibody vendor, Chemicon, has made a very nice 36 page pdf "Introduction to Antibodies". To make sense of antibody discussions, remember that what you call a protein, they call an antigen. If you want to find an antibody for a particular purpose, the Antibody Resource Page is a good place to start looking.

Protein chemist tutorials

This site has a number of tutorials on protein chemistry including purification, gels, antibodies, gels and modifications. It also has calculators for buffers and peptide characteristics.

What is Bioinformatics?

The short answer is that bioinformatics is the use of computers in molecular biology. Bioinformatics is one of the disciplines that proteomics is built upon. Bioinformatics grew up with (and is still largely focused on) genomics.