Achievement

First year graduate student and IGERT Fellow Joey Azofeifa’s 10-week rotation project in the laboratory of Will Old led to a significant advance in the lab’s ability to identify expressed protein variants that result from mutations and other genomic structural variants in cancer cell lines. His project involved the development of new software that uses our spectral matching algorithms to search cancer proteome data sets against cancer mutation databases and RNA-seq transcriptome profiles. We learned that many non-synonymous mutations in cancer cell lines can be detected quantitatively at the protein level, which has not been demonstrated yet on a proteome-wide scale. His work has opened the door to exciting new research directions, including the development of new methods for measuring allelic imbalance in protein variant expression, and measuring RNA editing and translational error rates. We plan to publish a paper describing the work at which time we will make the software available.