Achievement

First year IGERT trainees Christopher Jacobs and Jonathan Dreyfuss, and NIH Graduate Partnership Program trainee Yevgeniy Gindin, worked on a Challenge Project proposed by Joseph Zaia (Biochem) concerning the quanitification of high-throughput glycomics mass spec. data. Glycomics is the study of sugars that are linked to proteins. Unfortunately, current mass spectrometry feature quantification software, developed for proteomics/metabolomics/etc., has been insufficient for this field. These students developed their own software package and user interface capable of performing relative quantification of glycans in a targeted manner from raw mzXML mass spec. files. Their software has successfully converted an hours-long, tedious manual quantification task into an opertation that can process gigabytes of data in a few minutes. A paper describing the software will be featured in an upcoming issue of Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry.