Posters

The presence of albumin in the urine of healthy subjects presents a stumbling block in diagnostics putting a question mark on the validity of albumin test for the detection of diabetic nephropathy. Therefore there arises a dire need to hunt for the proteins in the pertinent bio- fluids which can serve as biomarkers.

Breast cancer has diverse metastatic behavior. Subpopulations of cells with enhanced metastatic abilities either to bone (1833) or to lung (4175) have been isolated by the group of J. Massague by in vivo selection of MDA-MB-231 cells. We performed the 2-DE analysis of the cell lines. We have found and identified 11 differentially expressed protein spots.

The correpressor Alien is shown to interact with several proteins involved in regulation of transcription, DNA repair and cell cycle. Furthermore we found E2F1 transcription to be downregulated by Alien overexpression.

Increased nitric oxide (NO) production has been implicated in the pathogenesis of the hyperdynamic circulation found in patients with advanced liver disease. There were no differences between patients with liver disease and controls with regard whole body NO production. Our results, in a well characterised set of patients, argue against greater basal NOS-dependent whole body NO production in patients with decompensated liver disease.

LC-MS based proteomic experiments are used to compare complex biological samples across multiple conditions. Fast, powerful computational tools are needed to explore and detect differences in the areas of Expression Proteomics and Biomarker Discovery. In general, specialized steps are necessary to solve these difficult problems (binning, alignment & normalization, peak picking, relative quantitation, etc.). MS-Xelerator is a collection of software tools dedicated to all of the above tasks.

Caveolin1 (Cav-1) function either as a tumor supressor or as a promoter of metastasis. Overexpresion of cav-1 was correlated with: tumoral grading, proliferration markers (Ki67, p53), serum tumor markers (CEA, CA19.9) and angiogenic markers (VEGF, bFGF).

Automated chromatographic method development systems have been offered for a number of years, with varying degrees of effectiveness. A new system for automated method development, ACD/AutoChrom, is currently under development, and addresses some of the weaknesses of earlier configurations. AutoChrom uses both UV-Visible and MS detection to unequivocally track and resolve trace components, performing a chemometric evaluation of these detection techniques.

This research project aims to improve understanding of the behaviour of DU particulate in the environment, using a case study of a site that is heavily contaminated by past emissions. The research will help predict the long-term fate of pollution from uranium oxide particulate.

In order to facilitate high throughput screening of AD drug candidates, we have developed a new SensoLyte™ 520 b-secretase assay kit using a fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) peptide, HiLyte Fluor™ 488-Glu-Val-Asn-Leu-Asp-Ala-Glu-Phe-Lys(QXL™ 520)-OH. The longer excitation and emission wavelengths of HiLyte Fluor™488 minimize the interference from autofluorescence and absorbance of test compounds.