ENRICH

Project description

ENRICH aims at developing new cost-effective, fast and efficient tools for the enrichment of post translationally modified proteins overcoming the current limitations. By the seconding of 87 researchers across Europe and worldwide, the aim is to capitalize on the consortium expertise in complementary fields such as chemical synthesis, spectroscopy, and proteomics.

THE FACTS – The reliability to detect PTMs is crucial to understand human illnesses:
Scientific studies indicate that inefficient epigenetic control is associated with a wide variety of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like cancer, schizophrenia, and diabetes. Indeed, histone post translational modifications (PTMs) are crucial for many cellular processes including transcription and DNA repair.

THE PROBLEM – The enrichment with antibodies isn’t reliable enough:
Mass spectrometry (MS) is the technique of choice to identify PTMs across the proteome. MS requires an enrichment step generally performed using antibodies, but these have several limitations such as high costs, batch-to-batch variability and data reproducibility.

THE SOLUTION – Researching new cost-effective, fast and efficient techniques:
ENRICH will functionalize nanoparticles (NPs) with molecular receptors able to enrich PTMcontaining peptides, derived from proteolytic digestion, for subsequent MS analysis. Concurrently, the ability and selectivity of the synthesized receptors and functionalized NPs will be evaluated via spectroscopic analyses.

THE CONSORTIUM – Gathering the expertise required to tackle this challenge:
The consortium is composed of 9 high-level academic research groups from 2 different continents (Europe and America) and 2 highly innovative companies. By the seconding of 87 ERs/ERSs across Europe and worldwide, the aim is to capitalize on the consortium expertise in complementary fields such as chemical synthesis, spectroscopy, and proteomics.