The power of high-end computing is being used in the UCD Conway Institute Proteomics Lab to find out what proteins (discovered or undiscovered) are involved in diseases like thrombosis and cancer.
Using a large high performance computer cluster, Dr Matt Sullivan and his research team search for proteins using a software platform called the Proteomics Pipeline (Proline), whose development is funded jointly by SFI and Siemens. Proline’s goal is to speed up the biological analysis and ease the researcher’s task of dealing with difficult and complex biological data.
Much of the raw material for analysis comes from blood samples that have been treated with different drugs, and Proline determines the protein content and quantity from these samples. It also acts as a data warehouse for proteomics data, capturing and archiving important results as they are produced. It then presents these results to the researcher in an intuitive manner, allowing them to comprehend and manipulate complex data. Proline employs a powerful web interface that allows researchers to submit raw data remotely, and access results from the comfort of their desk.
Now managing the results of thousands of mass spectrometry experiments, Proline is widely used in the Proteomics facility in the Conway Institute, with researchers from a number of groups involved in proteomics research using the system to extract results from this body of continually expanding data.
One such group is Dr Gerard Cagney’s Proteomics Lab group. An SFI Principal Investigator, Dr Cagney was involved with a paper recently published in Nature entitled ‘Global landscape of protein complexes in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae’. The data from this work is available online and will help future studies on individual proteins, functional genomics and systems biology
