Patsy Renard
Projet Equipement - New MS UNamur
The UNamur has recently organised its large equipments into 8 technology platforms. Among them, the Mass Spectrometry facility of the UNamur (MaSUN) has 2 mass spectrometers (MS) : one for the analysis of small molecules, and one high resolution MS (HRMS) dedicated to proteomics analyses. This proposal aims to get a funding contribution to renew the HRMS, bought in 2009. Thanks to a highly qualified technical staff, this equipment is intensively used for very diverse proteomics projects, proposed by researchers from UNamur and from other universities (21 different projects are currently ongoing). Except a contribution to maintenance and consumables, the access for academic researchers is free.
The project presented here represents only two of the proteomic projects supported by MaSUN. In addition to provide answers to biological questions, they will pursue technological developments in the field of nucleic acids-proteins interactions, as both transcriptional and translational controls depend on interactions with regulatory proteins. To identify these regulators, affinity purification strategies followed by mass spectrometry (AP-MS) have emerged. Such methods are technically challenging due to sensitivity/specificity issues, as regulatory proteins are of low abundance compared with the proteins that bind in a non-sequence specific manner to nucleic acids or to the solid support. We have succeeded to overcome most of these technical difficulties by developing a method enabling the identification by MS of a large number of transcriptional regulators captured by a long DNA sequence.
Here we propose to pursue the technological development of this method by
- developing the quantitative aspect and
- adapting the assay to the identification of RNA-binding regulatory proteins.
This second objective will be focused on the identification of proteins interacting with the Schmallenberg virus RNA, a virus using non-classical mechanisms for its transcription and translation.
