So What Was the Lab-Coated Army Doing Instead?

Over at In the Pipeline, Derek Lowe blogs about a new paper from Benjamin Cravatt looking at which proteins reacted to test compounds. "A brutally efficient proteolysis/mass spectroscopy technique, described by Cravatt in 2005, was used to simultaneously identify the labeled proteins and the sites at which they reacted," he writes. "This is clearly the sort of experiment that would have been unthinkable not that many years ago, and it still gives me a turn to see only Cravatt, Weerapana, and a third co-author (Gabriel Simon) on this one instead of some lab-coated army." Lowe describes the paper in more detail, including the interesting reaction patterns that emerged.