The Imperial College 2D-IR group is part of the Single Cell Proteomics (SCP) initiative. A new facility to develop 2D-IR has been provided for the SCP project (See Optical Setups).

Imperial College SCP aims to combine 2D-IR with sophisticated cell sorting, cell selection, controlled digestion and electrophoresis – all in a microfluidic environment.

The combination of these technologies will result in a powerful and unique platform, enabling a large number of interesting and biologically relevant studies to be carried out.

Identification of proteins at low copy number is one of the key contributions that 2D-IR aims to make to this project. Our current research activities are two- fold:

1) Assess the information content of protein spectra recorded using various 2D-IR methodologies

- Protein fingerprinting using DOVE-2D-IR (See Peptides & Proteins Fingerprinting)

- Development and assessment of complementary 2D-IR methods

2) Increase the sensitivity of various 2D-IR techniques to enable studies on low numbers of proteins.