Agilent Technologies and the Institute for Systems Biology have created the Human Multiple Reaction Monitoring (MRM) Atlas, which lets scientists quantitatively analyse all human proteins.
The project is expected to fuel important research gains in biomarker discovery and validation, the search for protein-based diagnostic tests, personalised medicine and human health monitoring.
The programme is supported by grants totalling USD4.6m (GBP2.8m) from the National Human Genome Research Institute to ISB's Robert Moritz and Leroy Hood for developing the 'Complete Human Peptide and MRM Atlas'.
Ruedi Aebersold of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich is collaborating as well, with additional funding from the European Research Council.
The work, which will take place over two years, will be performed using Agilent triple quadrupole and quadrupole time-of-flight liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS) systems and nanoflow HPLC-Chip/MS systems at the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) in Seattle and at ETH Zurich.
Moritz, ISB faculty member and director of proteomics, said: 'We believe this will be a revolutionary development in protein analysis, one that will accelerate and catalyse the routine use of protein quantitation for immensely important breakthroughs in the understanding, early detection and monitoring of human disease.' The MRM Atlas is designed to enable scientists to quantitatively access the approximately 20,000 proteins in human tissues, cell lines and blood, potentially transforming many areas of human-health research.
The project will produce a database of up to four peptides per human protein-coding gene, with verified rapid and accurate MRM-based mass spectrometric assays to enable the unambiguous identification and quantification of almost any protein in the human proteome.
It is expected to benefit general biology research and large-scale proteomic studies.
