Quantitative proteomics can provide accurate molecular

phenotypes of microbes that are difficult to determine using alternative technologies. Over the recent few years we and others have developed a range of proteomic technologies for the quantitative analysis of microbial JAK inhibitor proteomes. Here, we describe the most commonly used techniques and discuss their strengths and weaknesses and illustrate their respective performance for the identification of virulence factors in Streptococcus pyogenes.”
“Calculation of pathogen growth rates is important in understanding the natural history of infection and effects of therapy. However, it is often difficult to estimate pathogen growth because patients are treated immediately upon the detection of infection, leaving only one nonzero untreated learn more reading. Previous approaches have relied on the flawed assumption that pathogen loads just prior to detection are at the assay detection threshold. We have developed a novel method for estimating the pathogen growth rate from a single reading and investigated the initial growth of cytomegalovirus (CMV) in allogeneic

hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) patients. We applied this approach to CMV viral loads measured at least weekly in 122 patients in the 3 months posttransplant. Viral growth rates were estimated by using a modeling approach that accounts for the viral load and the time since the last negative reading. Viral growth rates decreased rapidly within the first week, from 0.72/day (doubling time, 0.96 day) at the point of reactivation to 0.22/day (doubling time, 3.1 days) at 1 week. Results from this method correlated closely with a two-point regression analysis of a subset of 58 patients with detectable subthreshold viral loads immediately prior to overt reactivation. Patients with lymphocyte counts of >= 0.5 x 10(9)/liter had significantly slower viral growth than patients with low lymphocyte counts (0.612/day versus 0.325/day,

P < 0.0001). Thus, our novel method of estimating pathogen growth rates reveals a rapid slowing of CMV growth during reactivation in HSCT patients and a significant impact of the lymphocyte count on CMV growth.”
“In this paper, we discuss the challenge of large-scale quantification of a proteome, referring to our programme that aims to define the absolute quantity, in copies per cell, of at least 4000 proteins in the Selleck Etomoxir yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We have based our strategy on the well-established method of stable isotope dilution, generating isotopically labelled peptides using QconCAT technology, in which artificial genes, encoding concatenations of tryptic fragments as surrogate quantification standards, are designed, synthesised de novo and expressed in bacteria using stable isotopically enriched media. A known quantity of QconCAT is then co-digested with analyte proteins and the heavy: light isotopologues are analysed by mass spectrometry to yield absolute quantification.