LC/MS-based Discovery of Peptide Hormones in Fishes and the Fluidity of Sex Webinar

Webinar: Tuesday, June 16th, 2020

12:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time

Presented by Professor Jonathan Sweedler, Ph.D., University of Illinois, Urbana, IL

Neuropeptides and hormones play critical roles in many aspects of organism functioning, learning and social adaptations. The wholesale identification of endogenous neuropeptides and peptide hormones, peptidomics, is complicated as a single prohormone precursor gene produces multiple neuropeptides that oftentimes cannot be inferred from genomic data due to complex post-translational processing. When genomic data are not available for biological models, de novo characterization by LC-MS/MS and bioinformatics is the only option. We describe our bioinformatics approach for in silico annotation of neuropeptides and their validation by LC-MS/MS based peptidomics in two fish species with unique but different behavioral adaptations. Lastly, we compare several search engines for their efficiency for de novo neuropeptide sequencing, as well as explore issues with determining several common hormone modifications.