Energy and carbon accounting to compare bioenergy crops.

To compare the utility of current and future biofuels and biofuel feedstocks in an objective manner can be extremely challenging. This challenge exists because agricultural data are inherently variable, experimental techniques are crop-dependent, and the literatures usually report relative, rather than absolute, values. Here, we discuss the 'PETRO approach', a systematic approach to evaluate new crops.

High-resolution functional proteomics by active-site peptide profiling.

Characterization and functional annotation of the large number of proteins predicted from genome sequencing projects poses a major scientific challenge. Whereas several proteomics techniques have been developed to quantify the abundance of proteins, these methods provide little information regarding protein function. Here, we present a gel-free platform that permits ultrasensitive, quantitative, and high-resolution analyses of protein activities in proteomes, including highly problematic samples such as undiluted plasma.

Inhibitor focusing: direct selection of drug targets from proteomes using activity-based probes.

In the latter stages of drug discovery and development, assays that establish drug selectivity and toxicity are important when side effects, which are often due to lack of specificity, determine drug candidate viability. There has been no comprehensive or systematic methodology to measure these factors outside of whole-animal assays, and such phenomenological assays generally fail to establish the additional targets of a given small molecule, or the molecular origin of toxicity. Consequently, small-molecule development programs destined for failure often reach advanced stages of testing, and the money and time invested in such programs could be saved if information on selectivity were available early in the process.

Synergistic computational and experimental proteomics approaches for more accurate detection of active serine hydrolases in yeast.

An analysis of the structurally and catalytically diverse serine hydrolase protein family in the Saccharomyces cerevisiae proteome was undertaken using two independent but complementary, large-scale approaches. The first approach is based on computational analysis of serine hydrolase active site structures; the second utilizes the chemical reactivity of the serine hydrolase active site in complex mixtures. These proteomics approaches share the ability to fractionate the complex proteome into functional subsets.