Traditionally, proteins in cells have been analysed individually to determine their locations, interactions and functions. More recently, proteomics (large-scale study of proteins) has enabled scientists to gain inventories of the multitude of proteins produced in a cell at a given time, but without any spatial and functional information. And now there’s spatial proteomics. By isolating a large number of individual organelles and structures from within a given cell type and performing mass spectrometry to determine the particular proteins associated with them, researchers can determine the cellular locations and potential interaction partners of thousands of proteins at a given moment. The image shows the barely-known protein TMEM184 (white), for example, which was identified as a lysosome-associated protein by the latest spatial proteomics technique. Knowing the cellular locations and associations of TMEM184 and, simultaneously, thousands of other proteins provides both a global and incredibly detailed view of the cell all at once.
Image from work by Marco Y. Hein, Duo Peng, Verina Todorova, Frank McCarthy, Kibeom Kim and Chad Liu, and colleagues
Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, San Francisco, CA, USA
Image originally published with no restrictions – Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Research published in Cell, December 2024
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