In the May 20, 2013 issue of C&E News (Volume 91, Issue 20), Senior Editor, Celia Henry Arnaud profiles the field of Top Down Proteomics in a cover story titled: "Top Down Proteomics Becomes Reality."

In the mid-1990s, as the Human Genome Project was in full swing, scientists started thinking about the protein complement of the genome, and proteomics—the identification and characterization of all of an organism’s proteins—was born. Early proteomics methods used enzymes to digest proteins into pieces that could be easily analyzed by mass spectrometry. Those methods are now mature and routinely detect peptides from thousands of proteins in a single run.

Read the Full Article

In the March 2013 issue of Nature Methods, Neil Kelleher and Lloyd Smith, investigators within the Consortium for Top Down Protoemics, have proposed a new term for the myriad forms of proteins that can be found in nature.

See the Methagora blog post by Allison Doerr: An all-encompassing term to describe protein complexity

Read the Article in Nature Methods: Proteoform: a single term describing protein complexity

The 61st ASMS Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics will be held June 9-13, 2013 in Minneapolis, MN. 

The conference program begins on Sunday, June 9 with tutorial lectures at 5:00 pm and the opening session and plenary lecture at 6:45 pm. A Welcome Reception in the poster/exhibit hall will follow. Monday through Thursday are full program days of concurrent oral sessions, poster sessions, and workshops. Poster sessions are scheduled 10:30 am to 2:30 pm to allow four hours of viewing. The program will conclude on Thursday, June 13 with a plenary lecture followed by a Closing Gala at the Convention Center (ticket required).

The Consortium for Top Down Proteomics will be meeting on Monday, June 10, 2013 at a workshop from 5:45pm - 7:00pm.  Organizers will be Ying Ge from the University of Wisconsin and Nick Young from the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.  We will see you then!

For more information on the program and how to register, please see the ASMS website.

The 10th Uppsala Conference (UppCon) on ECD/ETD and related topics will be held February 16-21, 2013 in Beijing, China. Organizers of the conference are Meng-Qiu Dong of the National Institute of Biological Sciences (NIBS) in Beijing and Rui-Xiang Sun of the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

The topics of the Uppsala Conference encompass theories, experiments, instrumentation, and applications related to ion-ion or ion-electron reactions. UppCon rotates among North America, Europe, and Asia. This is the first time that UppCon comes to Mainland China. A training course is designed to introduce more students and researchers to fundamental mass spectrometry.

For more information on the program and how to register, please see the UppCon 2013 website.