Gaining Weight: the Dieter's Plan to Mass Spectrometry

Alexander Schramm | Pages 95-98 | BioTeach Online Journal | Vol. 1 | Fall 2003

The existence of an open reading frame in genomic sequence data does not necessarily guarantee the existence of a functional gene. Despite the recent advances in bioinformatics, it is still difficult to predict genes accurately from genomic data alone1. A recent study concluded that the error rate was as least 8% in the annotations of 340 genes from the Mycoplasma genitalium genome2. Therefore, verification of a gene product by proteomic methods is an important step in annotating the genome3. The most significant breakthrough in proteomics has been the ability to utilize mass spectrometric identification of gel-separated proteins. Mass spectrometry relies...