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Biology subjects

Kaiser, C. J. O.

Publications and source records attributed to Kaiser, C. J. O..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

In situ polymerized monolith tips for reproducible, format-flexible proteomic sample preparation applied to biofluids

Sample preparation increasingly sets the throughput and reproducibility of mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics. StageTips (stop-and-go extraction tips) and variants thereof have long been common implements to purify samples, and we recently extended the concept to solid-phase extraction capture (SPEC) tips, in which the entire digestion takes place in sub-microliter volumes. Here we replace the hand-packed bed with a strong anion-exchange (SAX) monolith photopolymerized directly inside the pipette tip from a defined recipe (pSPEC). A liquid-handling robot casts 384 tunable tips in minutes, at low cost and in any format, adding negligibly to the workflows variance. Across biofluids, pSPEC added [~]20% more identifications than in-solution plasma and reached 3,500 protein groups from a single injection of healthy urine and 4,800 from saliva at 100 samples per day, depths usually requiring depletion or fractionation. The same light-cast chemistry should extend to single cells, affinity capture, and population-scale studies.

biochemistry↗

Serial Lift-Out - Sampling the Molecular Anatomy of Whole Organisms

Cryo-focused ion beam milling of frozen-hydrated cells and subsequent cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) has enabled the structural elucidation of macromolecular complexes directly inside cells. Application of the technique to multicellular organisms and tissues, however, is still limited by sample preparation. While high-pressure freezing enables the vitrification of thicker samples, it prolongs subsequent preparation due to increased thinning times and the need for extraction procedures. Additionally, thinning removes large portions of the specimen, restricting the imageable volume to the thickness of the final lamella, typically < 300 nm. Here, we introduce Serial Lift-Out, an enhanced lift-out technique that increases throughput and obtainable contextual information by preparing multiple sections from single transfers. We apply Serial Lift-Out to C. elegans L1 larvae yielding a cryo-ET dataset sampling the worms anterior-posterior axis and resolve its ribosome structure to 7 [A], illustrating how Serial Lift-Out enables the study of multicellular molecular anatomy.

biophysics↗