Bilateral NSF/BIO-BBSRC: Bayesian Quantitative Proteomics

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As well as the academic beneficiaries, the proposed research has significant prospective impact for the mass spectrometry industry and associated proteomics vendors. The proposed Bayesian Quantiative Proteomics platform will increase the amount of usable data extracted from LC-MS and therefore correspondingly increase users' return on investment. This will make commercial mass spectrometry instrumentation, which requires considerable capital and running costs, more attractive. In particular, we hope this extra research capacity will attract a wider uptake of mass spectrometry in environmental, biological and health research in industry and academia, as well as a wider audience of users and uses amongst systems biology researchers.

There is potential for direct impact through the licensing of some or all of our software tools developed, as we are working towards for other packages with Waters Inc.

There is considerable potential in this application for providing indirect benefits to UK public health, quality of life and environmental sustainability. Our aim is to establish a powerful platform for differential proteoform analysis and discovery enabling a wealth of new investigations in the biological sciences and translational medicine. Due to its success and further substantial promise, the BBSRC, UK research councils and industry have invested greatly in the systems biology approach. The potential improvements yielded by our workflow will therefore have a clear dissemination route to the public through reduced resources, costs and overheads required for discoveries realised with systems approaches in environmental, biological and biomedical science, and the characterisation of those discoveries.

The PDRAs employed on this grant benefit significantly from exposure to the wealth of proteome informatics expertise we will bring together, particularly since the PDRAs will be encouraged to play a significant role in public dissemination. All staff will benefit through being engaged within an international, cutting edge interdisciplinary project.