Diversity of Conopeptides and Conoenzymes from the Venom Duct of the Marine Cone Snail as Determined from Transcriptomic and Proteomic Analyses.

Marine cone snails are predatory gastropods characterized by a well-developed venom apparatus and highly evolved hunting strategies that utilize toxins to paralyze prey and defend against predators. The venom of each species of cone snail has a large number of pharmacologically active peptides known as conopeptides or conotoxins that are usually unique in each species. Nevertheless, venoms of only very few species have been characterized so far by transcriptomic approaches.

Automating mass spectrometry-based quantitative glycomics using aminoxy tandem mass tag reagents with SimGlycan.

Protein glycosylation is a common post-translational modification, which serves critical roles in the biological processes of organisms. Monitoring of changes in the abundance and structure of glycans may be necessary to explain the correlations between protein glycosylation and various diseases. Hence, the growing importance of glycoproteomics necessitates in-depth qualitative and quantitative studies of glycans.

Bioinformatics in glycomics: glycan characterization with mass spectrometric data using SimGlycan.

Mass spectrometry (MS), with its low sample requirement and high sensitivity, has been the predominantly used methodology for characterization and elucidation of glycan structures. However, manual interpretation of MS data is complex and tedious due to large number of product ions observed and also due to the variation in their m/z values under various experimental conditions. We present an automated tool, SimGlycan, for this purpose, which accepts raw/standard MS data files as input and characterizes the associated glycan structure with high accuracy using database searching and scoring techniques.

AlleleID: a pathogen detection and identification system.

Efficient clinical diagnosis of pathogens is important for the management of infectious diseases. Conventional methods have longer turnaround time and, in most cases, lower sensitivity. Nucleic acid-based methods for the detection of microorganisms are rapid, sensitive and are generally successful even when the culturing of microorganisms fails.