YouTube video by European Partnership for Personalised Medicine

High-throughput mass spectrometry-based proteomics has gained increasing interest for both academic and industrial applications. As implementation of faster gradients has facilitated higher sample thr...

Palaeoproteomic data can provide invaluable insights into hominid evolution over long timescales. Yet, the potential and limitations of ancient protein sequences to resolve evolutionary relations betw...

The SC-pSILAC method enables single-cell measurement of both protein abundance and turnover, providing notable advances in the depth and versatility of proteomic technologies.

Mass spectrometry-based single-cell proteomics (SCP) is gaining momentum but remains limited to a few laboratories due to the high costs and specialized expertise required. The ability to send samples to specialized core facilities would benefit nonspecialist laboratories and popularize SCP for biological applications. However, no methods have been tested in SCP to “freeze” the proteome state while maintaining cell integrity for transfer between laboratories or prolonged sorting using fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS). This study evaluates whether short-term formaldehyde (FA) fixation can maintain the cell states. We demonstrate that short-term FA fixation does not substantially affect protein recovery, even without heating and strong detergents, and maintains analytical depth compared with classical workflows. Fixation also preserves drug-induced specific perturbations of the protein abundance during cell sorting and sample preparation for SCP analysis. Our findings suggest that FA fixation can facilitate SCP by enabling sample shipping and prolonged sorting, potentially democratizing access to SCP technology and expanding its application in biological research, thereby accelerating discoveries in cell biology and personalized medicine.

Chip-Tip is a label-free quantification-based single-cell proteomics workflow for deep single-cell proteomics, which identifies over 5,000 proteins and 40,000 peptides in single HeLa cells.