On the trail of a core proteome for bacteria

摘要

Although scientists can identify genes that are common to all of the variants of a particular species,they generally do not check whether the proteins encoded by a core genome are expressed.For the first time,researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have validated the expression of the common genes and defined a core proteome shared by multiple species of bacteria (PLoS ONE 2008,3,el542).To verify their proposed set of conserved bacterial genes,Stephen Cal-lister,Joshua Adkins,Mary Lipton,and their colleagues have used LC/MS/ MS to identify the proteins expressed by the genes conserved across 17 different types of bacteria.The "study advances the application of proteomics beyond the paradigms of single organism versus multiple conditions or wild-type versus mutant comparisons," says Callister.