Courses

In addition to dissemination through applied projects that are part of the Biology Working Groups, technologies developed in the Center will be disseminated through technology transfer, training and commercialization. SPC will train personnel from academic or private sector research institutions in emerging proteome technologies through regular courses, talks and seminars and a visiting scientist program.

Proteome Interest Group (PIG) is an internal seminar series created to provide an educational resource for ISB staff and their collaborators who have an interest in the application of proteomics technologies. Though not open to the general scientific community, collaborators may contact Theresa Fitzgerald, for more information about scheduled presentations. However, this group is currently on hiatus.

SPIGOT is a local area interest group devoted to discussion, development, and dissemination of proteomics software tools. The primary goal of SPIGOT is to encourage open and collaborative software development as an extension of the research being undertaken within ISB. By gathering computational researchers from local institutions to meet on a regular basis, we hope to productively address the common data analysis challenges facing each of our proteomics programs. As a forum to also disseminate software tools developed within ISB, and to work directly with computational counterparts in other organizations who will implement these tools in their own environments, this will also be a forum to educate and train researchers on the effective use of specific software tools. Past external participants include researchers from the University of Washington, the Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center, Amgen (formerly Immunex), and other Seattle-area companies. This series is organized by Eric Deutsch.

Visiting scientist program – SPC offers the opportunity for outside scientists to visit for extended periods of time for the purpose of performing collaborative research and training in the field of proteomics related to NHLBI-related projects. Due to limited space and resources, careful consideration will be given to the selection of projects and investigators. Requests for consideration of acceptance into this program should be directed to Rob Moritz.

Proteomic/Informatics course: The ISB has pioneered a new approach for quantitative protein profiling based on the ICAT regent technology and tandem mass spectrometry. Such experiments typically lead to the acquisition of thousands to tens of thousands of tandem mass spectra. The manual interpretation and validation of these data is no longer possible and it is difficult to consistently interpret the information contained in proteomic profiles without the help of suitable software tools. Therefore, the Center is also developing a suite of software tools that range from the identification of peptides via sequence database searching of tandem mass spectra, the validation of the search results using statistical principle, the organization of the data in a relational database to the interpretation of proteomic data in the context of functional modules and biological pathways.

The ISB has adopted an open source software policy. To facilitate dissemination of the tools, the ISB periodically offers a course in proteomics-related software tools in which the principles behind the tools and their use will be instructed. Each course participant will also obtain copies of the tools for use in their institutions.