Week 7: What is Proteomics?
Akash K -
Hey all! Welcome back to my blog! This week, I began by isolating more proteins. By the end of the week, I had 15 protein candidates that my mentor approved of. He brought up a concept called proteomics, which was foreign to me. Honestly, after so many biology courses, I was accustomed to being able to explain everything that came my way, but this word had me stumped. I asked my mentor what that meant because I tried looking it up, but I did not fully understand it. They told me that the main thing to know is that it is the study of proteins, their structures, function, etc. I then began my analysis of the data.
The first thing I had to do was to figure out upregulated vs downregulated candidates. When looking at Alzheimer’s tissue, some proteins will be expressed in larger quantities (upregulated) and other in smaller quantities (downregulated) in the presence of Amyloid plaque. My mentor told me to look at two scenarios and see how the protein reacts to them. One scenario had the protein exist in healthy conditions (VEH), and the other had the protein in tissue modified to have Alzheimer’s Disease (AB). In the Excel sheet, there were two means named high mean and low mean. If AB is in the high mean column, then amyloid plaque upregulates the protein because that means the protein shows up more when plaque is present; if AB is in the low mean column, then amyloid plaque downregulates the protein. Out of the fifteen proteins, I had eight downregulated and 7 upregulated. This concludes my analysis for the week.
My other task for the week was to put together a PowerPoint about proteomics. I am a little nervous about that because all the sources I have been seeing skip the vital mass spectrometry part because most videos assume that only a highly specialized lab can do it. After I find the correct resources, I hope to be able to make a step-by-step PowerPoint presentation on how to perform a proteomic analysis, which will show up in next week’s blog!
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