Background: Proteomics is a modern key analytical technology which aims to simultaneously identify and characterize all of the proteins and their modifications in different biological samples. By understanding the changes that occur in protein structure and dynamics, new insights can be gained into disease pathways such as those leading to cancer, autoimmune disorders and infectious diseases and an improved understanding of biological phenomena.
The Smoler Proteomics Center, established at 2004 by the Technion and Israel Ministry of Science, is the foremost Israeli national infrastructure hub for proteome analysis. It facilitates a direct access to technologies, instrumentation and knowhow in the field of protein bioanalysis to all researchers in the life sciences in Israel. The center is part of the Lorry I. Lokey Interdisciplinary Center for Life Sciences and Engineering.
Activities in the center range from identifying and quantifying proteins, to protein profiling, quantitative proteomics, analysis of protein complexes, determination of posttranslational modifications patterns, and variants analysis between similar proteins. The Proteomics Center’s activities include both services and research collaboration and are scheduled on a first-come, first-served basis. Consultation to the users are done throughout the project from the experiment design to the explanations on the results and suggestions for follow-up experiments.
Personnel: The center personnel is headed by Dr. Tamar Ziv and the academic supervisor is Prof. Emeritus Arie Admon. Eight researchers, including four Ph.D., with diverse backgrounds and skills: biology, chemistry, biotechnology engineering, and mass spectrometry.
Equipment: The Smoler Proteomics Center is fully equipped with all the instrumentations required for peptide and proteins extraction and analysis. The main Instrumentations include high resolution and high accuracy mass spectrometers, enabling advanced proteomics (2 Q-Exactive plus, Q Exactive HF-X, Q Exactive HF instruments and 2 Exploris 480 instruments -all from Thermo Fisher Scientific. In addition, instrumentation for electrophoresis, in one and two dimensions, chromatography with capillary columns, and powerful computers and software tools, as needed for the analysis and quantitation of the mass spectrometry data. To further address the preparation and separation issues, a new integrated purification and separation platform, Evosep One, was recently purchased.
