Chemical cytometry for more accurate cancer prognosis

Norm Dovichi’s laboratory has a long history of developing and applying analytical technology for ultrasensitive proteomics. We are currently developing highly efficient microreactors for reduction, alkylation, and digestion of nanogram amounts of protein. By reducing the dimensions of the reactor, we minimize loss of proteins and peptides on the reactor surface, which facilitates analysis of those minute samples. Once samples have been processed, we analyze the tryptic digests using capillary electrophoresis coupled to mass spectrometry. Thousands of proteins are identified from a 100-ng sample.