John R. Yates III

Department of Chemical Physiology and Department of Molecular and Cellular Neurobiology, The Scripps Research Institute, LaJolla, CA

A component to understanding biological processes involves identifying the proteins expressed in cells as well as their modifications and the dynamics of processes. The technology to sequence proteins underwent significant disruption with the sequencing of genomes. Mass spectrometry has benefited from large-scale genome sequencing of organisms resulting in new methods for rapid and large-scale quantitative analysis of protein data from experiments. We’ve been developing mass spectrometry based methods for large-scale analysis of proteins in cells and recent developments will be discussed. We have also been using these methods to the study of brain function and disease. Application of these methods to the study depression models in rats will be described.