Research

Proteomics studies confirm the presence of alternative protein isoforms on a large scale

Michael L Tress¹ , Bernd Bodenmiller² , Ruedi Aebersold^2,3,4,5 and Alfonso Valencia¹

¹  Structural Biology and Biocomputing Programme, Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), C. Melchor Fernandez Almagro, Madrid 28029, Spain

²  Institute of Molecular Systems Biology, ETH, Wolfgang-Pauli-Str., 8093 Zurich, Switzerland

³  Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle, WA 98103, USA

⁴  Competence Center for Systems Physiology and Metabolic Diseases, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland

⁵  Faculty of Science, University of Zurich, 8057 Zurich, Switzerland

author email corresponding author email

Genome Biology 2008, 9:R162doi:10.1186/gb-2008-9-11-r162

Published:	18 November 2008

Subject areas: Genome studies, Model organisms, Molecular biology

Abstract

Background

Alternative splicing of messenger RNA permits the formation of a wide range of mature RNA transcripts and has the potential to generate a diverse spectrum of functional proteins. Although there is extensive evidence for large scale alternative splicing at the transcript level, there have been no comparable studies demonstrating the existence of alternatively spliced protein isoforms.

Results

Recent advances in proteomics technology have allowed us to carry out a comprehensive identification of protein isoforms in Drosophila. The analysis of this proteomic data confirmed the presence of multiple alternative gene products for over a hundred Drosophila genes.

Conclusions

We demonstrate that proteomics techniques can detect the expression of stable alternative splice isoforms on a genome-wide scale. Many of these alternative isoforms are likely to have regions that are disordered in solution, and specific proteomics methodologies may be required to identify these peptides.