Multicenter Study Demonstrates Standardization Requirements for Mold Identification by MALDI-TOF MS.

Objectives: Rapid and accurate mold identification is critical for guiding therapy for mold infections. MALDI-TOF MS has been widely adopted for bacterial and yeast identification; however, few clinical laboratories have applied this technology for routine mold identification due to limited database availability and lack of standardized processes. Here, we evaluated the versatility of the NIH Mold Database in a multicenter evaluation.

Immunomics in Skin Cancer - Improvement in Diagnosis, Prognosis and Therapy Monitoring.

This review will focus on the elements of the skin's immune system, immune cells and/or non-immune cells that support immune mechanisms, molecules with immune origin and/or immune functions that are involved in skin carcinogenesis. All these immune elements are compulsory in the development of skin tumors and/or sustainability of the neoplastic process. In this light, recent data gathered in this review will acknowledge all immune elements that contribute to skin tumorigenesis; moreover, they can serve as immune biomarkers.

Profiling of urine using ProteinChip® technology.

Urine is an extremely valuable sample type for biomarker discovery due to the non-invasive collection and the relatively low protein content, which makes detection of perturbations associated with disease easier. SELDI-TOF analysis is ideally suited for analysis of urine since the chromatographic capture mechanism can tolerate salt and urea in the urine sample that would otherwise need to be removed prior to mass spectrometric analysis. While neat urine can be analyzed directly on ProteinChip arrays, urine can also benefit from an enrichment step, which has been shown to increase the number of proteins detected more than twofold.

Purification and identification of candidate biomarkers discovered using SELDI-TOF MS.

Purification and identification of candidate biomarkers is a critical step in the biomarker development process, since it provides insight into the disease biology and facilitates the development of analyte-specific assays. Top-down biomarker discovery workflows like SELDI-TOF MS yield candidate markers that are identified based on native mass. Positive identification of these candidate biomarkers requires further enrichment and/or purification.

The Lucid Proteomics System for top-down biomarker research.

Advances have been made in recent years for both "top-down" and "bottom-up" profiling approaches to biomarker discovery. Top-down protein profiling via SELDI-TOF mass spectrometry has been used by researchers in many fields of study to discover native protein biomarker candidates from a variety of sample types, but has been limited without a means for straightforward identification of these candidates. Bio-Rad has recently partnered with Bruker Daltonics to create the Lucid Proteomics System, a complete SELDI-based research workflow--system qualification, biomarker discovery, data analysis, and biomarker purification/identification--using Bruker's flex series of TOF and TOF/TOF mass spectrometers, which have long provided consistent performance and high value data for MALDI applications.

Role of trehalose and heat in the structure of the C-terminal activation domain of the heat shock transcription factor.

The heat shock transcription factor (HSF) is the primary transcriptional regulator of the heat shock response in eukaryotes. Saccharomyces cerevisiae HSF1 has two functional transcriptional activation domains, located N- and C-terminal to the central core of the protein. These activation domains have a low level of transcriptional activity prior to stress, but they acquire a high level of transcriptional activity in response to stresses such as heat.