Biologists provide the questions that drive our research. By identifying complexes that are poorly understood or organism-wide issues that require further exploration, we find a wealth of problems in biology that are tractable only through proteomic strategies.

Analytical chemists and biochemists improve our tools for revealing the proteins present in biological samples. Targets for optimization include the isolations used to obtain proteins from biological materials, the subsequent steps to generate peptides from these proteins, and the separation of peptides en route to the mass spectrometer. Chemistry is vital to increasing the overall power of proteomic technology.

Computer science yields tools operating at two scales. First, the sequence corresponding to each peptide's tandem mass spectrum must be identified. Once those identifications have been completed, additional tools are needed to summarize and organize these identifications. Proteomics by tandem mass spectrometry requires powerful informatics capabilities.

By drawing these disciplines together, we are producing improved tools and techniques for proteomics. For more information, consult our publications.