The Marine Microbial Eukaryote Transcriptome Sequencing Project (MMETSP): Illuminating the Functional Diversity of Eukaryotic Life in the Oceans through Transcriptome Sequencing

Microbial ecology is plagued by problems of an abstract nature. Cell sizes are so small and population sizes so large that both are virtually incomprehensible. Niches are so far from our everyday experience as to make their very definition elusive. Organisms that may be abundant and critical to our survival are little understood, seldom described and/or cultured, and sometimes yet to be even seen. One way to confront these problems is to use data of an even more abstract nature: molecular sequence data. Massive environmental nucleic acid sequencing, such as metagenomics or metatranscriptomics, promises functional analysis of microbial communities as a whole, without prior knowledge of which organisms are in the environment or exactly how they are interacting. But sequence-based ecological studies nearly always use a comparative approach, and that requires relevant reference sequences, which are an extremely limited resource when it comes to microbial eukaryotes

TiO2-functionalized mesoporous materials for sensitive analysis of multi-phosphopeptides

Protein phosphorylation as one of the most important post-translational modifications in mammalian cells regulates numerous biological processes. Here we propose a novel strategy for the selective isolation and sensitive analysis of multi-phosphopeptides based on TiO2-gratfed mesoporous materials, in which MCM-41 and SBA-15 were chosen as the hard templates. The commercialized IMAC and TiO2 nanopartices were further investigated in the phosphopeptide analysis for comparison. The enrichment efficiency was evaluated and measured by MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry. The results indicated that both TiO2-SBA-15 and TiO2-MCM-41 exhibited the preferential affinity to multi-phosphopeptides compared with the other two widely used strategies. The mesoporous TiO2 based protocol showed highly selective and sensitive properties, where phosphopeptides could be identified at femtomole