Acquisition of a new mass spectrometer for proteomics analyses at UNamur

The UNamur has recently organised its large equipments into 8
technological 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 1) developing the quantitative aspect and 2) 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.