Founded in January 2010, the UAR 3290 Miniaturisation for Synthesis, Analysis and Proteomics, under the direction of Ahmed Mazzah is a support and research unit that is at the interface of chemistry by his membership in the FR 2638, Michel Chevreul Institute . For service, Top_Omics plateform, component UAR 3290 MSAP is labeled IBiSA (Infrastructures in Biology Health and Agronomy) and is one of the sites of Infranalytics, the project EU_FT-ICR_MS horizon 2020, IPERION HS and E-RIHS.
The UAR 3290 is structured around three areas: mass spectrometry, separation techniques, organic synthesis and physical chemistry. These crafts are available in a service component focused on the mass spectrometry and proteomics (Bray Fabrice, IR) and a research component that includes: three scientific themes, strong interactions:
- Instrumental development (Christian Rolando, DR)
- Chemicals and flow chromatography (Mael Penhoat, MCF, Laetitia Chausset-Boissarie CR)
These different themes and service component lead us to work with most units of the Chevreul Institute. Structurally, the Unit is organized on a non-hierarchical model, each researcher or teacher researcher who support a themes and each engineer an analytical axes.
The theme proteomic analysis is a unifying theme for the other axis of the group. Indeed, it is:
- The main reason instrumental investment in mass spectrometry whose implementation is supported by our group (FT-MS high field MALDI TOF / TOF)
- The engine of most of the group’s analytical developments (new electrophoresis gels, specific fluorescent probes, surface chemistry and MALDI open capillary column type),
- At the heart of our collaborations biological purposes (especially the detection of biomarkers of different diseases related to aging)
- Is a new field for the analysis of complex systems such as archaeological residues, paleoproteomics.
- And causes miniaturization efforts have allowed us to address the organic reactivity studies in micro / nano reactors.
Proteomics is an integrating science. Indeed subjects with high added values to be able to involve from a biological sample and to identify and quantify proteins and post-translational modifications (phosphorylation, glycosylation). The main steps are:
- Protein extraction is a critical step, and that is the formulation in terms of chemistry to extract the expected proteins (particularly membrane proteins)
- Labeling them with specific reagents for quantification
- The separation involves a very complex set of chromatographic techniques (two-dimensional electrophoresis, exchange and size exclusion chromatography, immunoaffinity chromatography)
- Spectrometric analysis coupled with mass liquid chromatography nanoscale (flow is 200 nanoliters per minute). Typically 1000 proteins can be detected.
- The Bioinformatics treatment is a major bottleneck. Current analytical techniques often lead to the identification of hundreds of proteins which requires elaborate statistical treatments.
