Medical School
Twin Cities
Work in the Griffin group involves the development and application of mass spectrometry-based tools to study proteins and proteomes. The goal of this work is to provide the necessary tools to enable the system-wide characterization of proteins expressed within a cell, tissue, biological fluid or organism, in order to better understand basic mechanisms of biological function and disease. These tools must be capable of measuring the many properties of proteins that collectively determine their function. These properties include protein abundance, sub-cellular localization, post-translational modifications, associations in non-covalent complexes, and biochemical activity. Mass spectrometry provides a highly powerful tool that can aid in measuring these various protein properties, in a high-throughput manner. The development and application of these tools is highly interdisciplinary in nature, integrating front-end molecular biology and biochemical methods, protein and peptide chemistry, analytical separations, instrumental analysis, and back-end computation and bioinformatics for data analysis and biological interpretation.
The group works heavily with MSI, including an ongoing project called Galaxy-P, in which the Galaxy platform is being extended for proteomic, metabolomic, and multi-omic data analysis applications. As part of this project, the group works with biologist collaborators from around the world to analyze data and provide insights into biological problems.
This research has been featured on the MSI website in:
- January 2018: New Proteogenomics Tool for Cancer Research
- November 2015: Expanding the Galaxy Platform
- October 2014: Using Proteomics Methods to Diagnose Oral Cancer