The breadth of ubiquitinated non-protein substrates, their abundance, and cellular roles are currently unclear, since current ubiquitinomic and proteomic techniques are blind to non-proteinaceous modifications.
From her office at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, she holds up a blue plastic model of a proteasome, a barrel-shaped structure with a hollow core. The function seems simple: proteins enter the chamber, where they are shredded and then exit as smaller peptide fragments. But the machinery is surprisingly elaborate. The core comprises more than two dozen protein subunits and can associate with a variety of regulatory caps.
This technology can give you a global picture of the proteins included in one specific cell or tissue region as small as possible that can be laser captured and microdissected. This technology can be broadly applied to analyzing any cell in any tissue in a spatially-preserved manner.