MacCoss, Michael

The focus of our research is in the development of stable isotope and mass spectrometry based approaches to improve our understanding of biology on a molecular, cellular, and whole organism level. Presently, individuals in the laboratory are working on technology for 1) automating biochemical sample preparation methods for the analysis of protein mixtures; 2) developing in vivo stable isotope methods for studying protein metabolism; 3) increasing the dynamic range of liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry for the analysis of peptides; and 4) developing computational tools for the automated conversion of mass spectrometry data into biologically meaningful results. These technologies are presently being demonstrated in the model organisms C. elegans and S. cerevisiae. Although our current research interests are presently in model systems, our long-term goal is have technologies robust enough to handle the automated high-throughput characterization of human clinical samples.