Proteomics workshop brings together the Fiocruz-Pasteur network

A workshop on Proteomics and Bioinformatics, organized by members of the Fiocruz-Pasteur network, brought together leading scientists from various nodes of the Fiocruz-Pasteur network and from distinguished groups of the field.  The meeting was hosted at the Institut Pasteur de Montevideo, from November 28^th to December 2^nd, and had students coming from South America, viz.: Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Selected students had all expenses payed for during their stay.

Dr. Carlos Batthyany and Dr. Rosario Duran, both from Institut Pasteur de Montevideo, introduced the concepts of modern shotgun proteomics and performed experiments on the newly acquired Thermo Q-Exactive plus mass spectrometer.  Dr. Julia Chamot-Rooke, from Pasteur-Paris, shared the challenges and results on top-down proteomics (i.e., analysis of intact proteins by mass spectrometry).  Dr. Fabio Gozzo from Unicamp, together with Dr. Diogo Borges from Pasteur-Paris (Chamot-Rooke’s lab) and a former member of the Carlos Chagas Institute – Fiocruz Paraná, demonstrated how to obtain protein structure information and pinpoint protein-protein interactions with cross-linking mass spectrometry.  Dr. Paulo Carvalho, also from Fiocruz – Paraná, led the classes on computational proteomics demonstrating PatternLab for Proteomics, a computational environment developed by his group and considered as a one-stop-shop for analyzing shotgun proteomic data; it was recently published in Nature Protocols (2016).  Finally, Dr. John R Yates III, from the Scripps Research Institute and creator of the modern shotgun proteomics paradigm, discussed the cutting edge of proteomics.

“During the workshop I had the opportunity to share experiences with researchers from many countries. I also started collaborations with institutions near Fiocruz – Paraná, such as Pasteur Montevideo and Universities in Argentina”, Dr. Michel Batista, responsible for the Fiocruz-Paraná Proteomics platform.

“It was a pleasure for our Institute to host this course, with recognized world leaders in the field of proteomics. In particular, the course was honored with the presence of John Yates III, the creator of the shotgun paradigm and Julia Chamot-Rooke, an expert in top down proteomics. For our Institute it was also remarkable to co-organize this course with Paulo Carvalho, a young senior computational proteomics scientist of Fiocruz Paraná”, Dr. Luis Barbeito, Director of Institut Pasteur de Montevideo

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Funding: United Nation University UNU-BIOLAC; PEDECIBA Biología (UdelarR, Uruguay) and FOCEM (Fondo para la convergencia Estructural del Mercosur).