THE INTRODUCTION OF THIS GROUP
The research group of Novel Materials and Methods for Separation and Detection of Biomolecules has about 25 members including 7 staff scientists and 20 graduate students. This group was founded by Prof. Hanfa Zou and now is headed by Dr. Mingliang Ye. The mission for our group is to develop novel methods for the analysis of complex samples especially proteome samples. We developed some nice methods for analysis of proteins and their post-translational modifications (Refer to the representative works for detail). We developed a series of method for the analysis of protein phosphorylation. For example, we developed an immobilized Ti(IV) affinity chromatography (Ti(IV)-IMAC) to specific enrichment of phosphopeptides which enabled the identification of phosphorylation sites with high sensitivity. We also RP-RP chromatographic approaches for efficient separation of phosphopeptides, which resulted in the identification of 22446 phosphorylation sites in human liver tissue. Recently, we have developed a highly efficient approach for large-scale identification of phosphotyrosine (pTyr), which enabled the identification of >10,000 pTyr sites from 9 cell lines. We also developed some nice approaches to analyze protein glycosylation. We developed a peptide N-terminal protection strategy for comprehensive glycoproteome analysis, which leaded to identify 30% more de-glycopeptides. We propose a novel high throughput strategy that combines spectra of deglycosylated peptides and intact glycopeptides to identify intact glycopeptides, which led to the identification of 2249 intact N-glycopeptides with unique combination of sites and glycan composition. We also developed a glycoproteomic micro-reactor which enabled identification of 92 unique N-glycosylation sites from only 10 nL of human serum. In addition, we also developed some software tools for proteomics analysis.
