July 2010. A new textbook has just been published with contribution from Fasmatech’s Dr. Emmanuel Raptakis. The new textbook has been edited by Prof. Haroun Shah and Prof. Saheer Gharbia of the Centre for Infections, London, UK. The new textbook is titled “Mass Spectrometry for Microbial Proteomics” and part of it introduces the subject of microbial identification with MALDI mass spectrometry.
Proteomics is the study of the proteome, the complete set of proteins produced by a species. It is often considered the next step in the study of biological systems, as it gives a much better understanding of an organism than genomics.
New advances in proteomics, driven largely by developments in mass spectrometry, continue to reveal the complexity and diversity of pathogenic mechanisms among microbes that underpin infectious diseases. Therefore a new era in medical microbiology is demanding a rapid transition from current procedures to high throughput analytical systems for the diagnosis of microbial pathogens.
This textbook covers the broad microbiological applications of proteomics using mass spectrometry. It is divided into six sections that follow the general progression in which most microbiology laboratories are approaching the subject – Transition, Tools, Preparation, Profiling by Patterns, Target Proteins, and Data Analysis.
