The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign is to be the home of a new National Institute of Drug Abuse Neuroproteomics Center on Cell-Cell Signaling run by Jonathan V. Sweedler (Director of the Biotechnology Center, Bioengineering, Chemistry) as Director and Principle Investigator, with Neil Kelleher (Chemistry, Bioengineering) and Sandra Rodriguez-Za (Animal Science, Bioengineering) as co-principle investigators. The major goals of the center are two-fold. The first is to develop new technology to allow the measurement of the compliment of signaling molecules, trophic factors and cytokines, the molecules used by the neurons and other cells in the brain to communicate. The technology development will include new single cell sampling protocols, methods to follow neuropeptide release from small brain regions, top down proteomics for protein identification and posttranslational modification characterization, and a unique suite of bioinformatics tools. The technology development occurs in three scientific cores, including a sampling and separation core run by Jonathan V. Sweedler, a Protein Identification Core run by Neil Kelleher and a Bioinformatics Core run by Sandra Rodreguiz-Zas.
The Center will enable the collaboration between those scientists with expertise in analytical chemistry and bioinformatics with those with expertise in biological and behavioral neuroscience to provide a unified, directed approach to discover the intricacies of intercellular signaling. While the biological users will change during the course of the center, the initial users are an exceptionally talented group of neuroscientists, including: David Clayton (Cell and Structural Biology), Martha Gillette (Cell and Structural Biology), Paul Gold (Psychology), William Greenough (Bioengineering, Cell and Structural Biology, Psychology), and Gene Robinson (Entomology, Integrative Biology, Cell and Structural Biology). The outside research groups are Howard Gutstein of the Anderson Cancer Center and Leonid Moroz at the University of Florida. Their samples will be analyzed in conjunction with Sweedler, Kelleher and Rodreguiz-Zas, as well as with the strong help of Peter Yau at the Biotechnology Center's Proteomics Facility and the SCS Mass Spectrometry Laboratory.
This exciting development should propel analytical chemistry and neuroscience to new levels at the UIUC.