Welcome to the peptidome

U.S. researchers have developed a peptide-based screen for identifying autoantigens associated with autoimmune diseases.¹ The researchers believe the screen could save time and money compared with other proteomic screens and plan to use the method to identify autoantigens associated with multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.

Accurately identifying autoantigens has been challenging because peptide or protein libraries that represent the full human proteome have not been generally available. Moreover, there were no methods for rapidly analyzing hundreds of thousands of autoantigen-autoantibody interactions in human serum...