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We work with HHMI laboratories to help structural biologists, molecular biologists, and physical chemists working with peptides and proteins get their work done --- to provide fast, accurate analysis and accurate syntheses -- and to help guide them through the organic chemistry aspects of their projects. Our emphasis is on quality-- to do what it takes to get the data needed. Some projects require our involvement from start to finish and are very labor-intensive, while others can be fairly quick. All the work takes place in an atmosphere that is intentionally one of relatively small-scale collaborative scientific research as opposed to a high-throughput "service" laboratory. Investigators and people in their labs usually communicate personally before, during, and after generating a sample.
Our principal tools are four mass spectrometers, an Edman sequencer, two peptide synthesizers, and various HPLCs. We typically measure intact protein masses, peptide masses, determine peptide sequences, and identify proteins often from gel spots or bands. We can usually identify proteins from tryptic digest masses or MS/MS data combined with database searching. In the case of novel proteins that are not in any searchable database, we can do de novo peptide sequencing. We also do some special peptide syntheses.