# An Integrated Microfluidic System for the Combining Top-Down and Bottom-Up Proteomics

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN · 2020 · $334,264

## Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract
 Systems biology seeks to understand how healthy biological systems work, and what goes wrong when
they stop working properly and become diseased gaining a holistic view of all of the biochemical components
and modeling how they change and interact. The biological system can be a cell, tissue, organism, or even
community of organisms. Proteins form nearly all of the machinery within a cell and consequently they greatly
influence proper biological function and dysfunction that is associated with disease. Thus, by improving
proteome analysis we can improve our understanding of proper function and dysfunction of biological systems.
The long-term objective of this research project is to provide improved methods for proteome analysis that
increase the detail of the proteins that can be analyzed from a biological sample. Namely, the number of
proteoforms identified will be greatly improved and surpass the number of proteins identified with peptide
fragment ion spectra based methods. To achieve this large improvement in the detection of proteoforms, a
novel microfluidic system will be developed that will integrate intact protein and peptide identification strategies
in a seamless and highly automated format. The specific aims of the proposed work will include development
of a high-efficiency two-dimensional separation and development of a microfluidic system for rapid sample
processing. The performance of the device will be determined through the analysis of Acinetobacter baumannii
and human jurkat cells, which represent relatively simple and complex proteomes, respectively. In addition to
being a relatively simple model, A. baumannii is clinically relevant because it causes infections in humans and
is gaining antibiotic resistance at an alarming rate. Human jurkat cells are involved in the human immune
response and have been highly studied and characterized. This high degree of jurkat cell characterization will
provide an excellent benchmark to compare the performance of the proposed microfluidic proteomic system
against other commonly used proteomics approaches.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9853018
- **Project number:** 5R01EB025268-04
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
- **Principal Investigator:** Aaron T Timperman
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $334,264
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2018-04-02 → 2021-12-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9853018

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9853018, An Integrated Microfluidic System for the Combining Top-Down and Bottom-Up Proteomics (5R01EB025268-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9853018. Licensed CC0.

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