APAF Newsletter Vol. 5 No. 1

Introduction

2015 represents an important milestone for APAF as we celebrate 20 years of proteomic research and service to the Australian life-science community. During this time we have seen proteomics develop from a nascent “expert-only” technology into an essential tool with vast application across many life-science research sectors in academia and industry.

APAF's high performance confirmed in international mass spec study

APAF’s high performance confirmed in international, inter-laboratory mass spectrometry study on accurate quantitation and reproducibility

In a benchmarking study amongst 16 international proteomic laboratories APAF demonstrates its high quality to accurately and reproducibly quantitate plasma peptides for biomarker studies (Percy et al. EuPA Open Proteomics 2015). In this study APAF was named as Site 7 and used a QTRAP 5500 mass spectrometer with selected reaction monitoring and a Waters nanoUPLC system. Read more

Cytokine profiling uncovers protein patterns of chemoresistance in prostate cancer.

A recent publication showcases the work APAF conducted in collaboration with Dr Lisa Horvath and colleagues from RPAH and Chris O’Brien’s Lifehouse (Mahon et al. Br. J. Cancer, 2015). This study investigated plasma cytokine levels in patients with docetaxel-resistant prostate cancer. APAF scientists used a multiplexed bead-based ELISA assay (BioPlex) to quantitate the levels of 27 human cytokines/chemokines in 55 patients pre/post docetaxel cycle 1. Read More

New diagnostic markers to characterise thyroid cancers

Leveraging the highly discriminative utility of targeted mass spectrometry by selected reaction monitoring, APAF Director Mark Molloy and PhD student Juan Martinez-Aguliar developed assays to quantitate the S100 protein isoform family (Martinez-Aguilar and Molloy, J. Proteome Res, 2013). This breakthrough led to a new collaboration with Prof Rory Clifton-Bligh, an endocrinologist at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney. Read more