Achievement

IGERT student Ryan Sartor is currently pursuing a project in the Briggs lab that aims to create a protein atlas for Zea mays. This is a collection of semi-quantitative proteome profiles from different tissues at different times of development and also under several abiotic and biotic stress conditions. For each sample, both unmodified and phosphorylated proteins are examined. With tools and knowledge gained through interaction with the Bandeira lab, Ryan has taken up a project to analyze phosphorylation events that occur in a well-characterized region of the kinase domain called the activation loop. Phosphorylation of this region is thought to be highly related to the activation of many protein kinases.

Ryan is also exploring several state of the art mass spec computational analysis tools that are being developed in the Bandeira's lab. Ryan is attempting to apply these methods to the Briggs lab Maize Atlas in order to extract more quantitative information from the raw data.