Selected Reaction Monitoring Course
In July 2013, SystemsX.ch supported the Selected Reaction Monitoring (SRM) course at ETH Zurich. This practical course was aimed at acquainting participants with SRM and enabling them to conduct a complete SRM experiment according to their own biological questions in their home laboratories. The next opportunity to attend this course will be in February 2014.
During the course, the 30 participants acquired and refined four distinct skills required for the actual implementation of SRM:
- How to translate a biological question of interest (e.g., a protein network) into a list of SRM assays.
- How to measure and optimize SRM assays using triple-quadrupole mass spectrometers.
- How to analyze SRM data in a reasonable throughput.
- How to perform statistical analysis of acquired SRM data, in order to extract biological meaning.
The course attracted not only Swiss scientists, but also an international audience. The participants from 11 different European countries appreciated the mixture of theoretical introductory sessions, comprehensive hands-on training and discussion rounds on each of the four skills. Throughout the practical course participants were instructed by speakers from Ruedi Aebersold’s lab, as well as national and international experts in the field, including some of the principal developers of the presented strategies and software tools. The positive feedback shows that this course was very useful to the participants.
The next SRM course will take place on February 10 to 14, 2014 at ETH Zurich. Registration is open until October 31, 2013. More information and registration form
SRM at a glance
Over the past few years, targeted proteomics has emerged as a complement to the more widely used discovery or shotgun proteomic methods, thanks to its high sensitivity, quantitative accuracy and reproducibility. The main mass spectrometry-based approach supporting targeted proteomics is Selected Reaction Monitoring (SRM). In SRM, specific mass spectrometric assays are generated a priori for each protein of interest and these assays are then used to selectively detect and quantify these proteins in a sample. SRM is a suitable approach to support systems-level biological questions that are targeted at a pre-defined network of proteins.