Saturday, October 3, 2015

Histone post-translational modifications in monocyte-derived macrophages

(Picture credit: Laxmi Iyer, original url [unrelated to this article] here.)

It turns out that most of the histone work that has been done out there has been done on mouse cell lines or immortalized human lines. While this is undoubtedly useful information, immortalized cell lines tend to be kind of messed up and we all know about the plus/minuses of studying mice.

The Ciborowski lab has a plan of long term, in-depth studying of histones and their post-translational modifications of normal human macrophages. In this first study (available here, open access) they work on establishing their normal, baseline conditions for resting macrophages. Once they get that, they can go on to further studies.

For this analysis they are primarily using an LTQ-Orbitrap XL with ETD and employing both CID and ETD fractionation. Surprisingly, the majority of the information being obtained for PTM matches is not coming from the ETD. This is likely due to the lower speed/efficiency of the earliest ETD system compared to the ones I normally get to mess around with. It does, however, contribute meaningfully to the study. This is a nice clear study but I mostly highlight it here because I'm very interested in what they are going to do next AND how this data is going to line up with other well established histone PTM datasets we have from other models.  So...this post is kind of to remind myself to check back on these guys later...sorry...

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