Ass. TP A3: Landscape of the kinome of several organs of mice of different ages and sexes

Kinases are a class of enzymes involved in every major cellular signaling pathway. They are heavily regulated on a post-translational basis making their activity level hard to infer with long established methods such as gene expression analysis. The development of peptide array-based methods has enabled us to perform high throughput kinase activity profiling of a wide range of tissues. My project aims to perform such analysis to determine differences in baseline kinase activity in several tissues of C57BL/6J mice of different ages and sexes.

Twelve different mouse tissues and organs were extracted and lysed to isolate cellular proteins. The protein lysates will be used in a peptide array-based kinase activity assay (PamGene) to determine kinase activities in the tissues as well as differences in kinase activities in said tissues between different age groups and sexes. The results will be validated using expression analysis and methods such as Western Blot as well as comparison to expression and activity data from literature.

Gaining a better understanding of differences in kinase activity across ages and sexes could enable us to better explain differences between the groups regarding organ function, responsiveness to certain treatments and susceptibility to disease.