The Gevaert lab is part of the VIB-UGent Center for Medical Biotechnology. Over the years, we have introduced a number of technologies for studying diverse aspects of proteomes by means of mass spectrometry. Besides performing rather routine proteome analyses such as differential proteomics and the analysis of protein complexes, we primarily focus on the comprehensive analysis of protein modifications which include phosphorylation, oxidation and ubiquitination. In fact, since the introduction of our COFRADIC technologies, we master the enrichment of protein N-terminal peptides, which are the perfect reporters of protein processing by proteases. In addition, these protein N-terminal peptides are the best proxies for co-translational events occurring on nascent protein chains at the ribosome exit tunnel. Over the past years, we particularly studied the N-terminal acetyltransferases (NATs) involved in co-translational alpha-N-terminal protein acetylation in different model systems, including disease models. We characterized their specificities, identified several of their substrates, showed their spatial intracellular distribution and identified their partners. In addition, we were among the first to report on the widespread use of alternative translation start codons, resulting in an ever increasing number of N-terminal proteoforms. More recently, we started to combine positional proteomics with ribosomal profiling and bioinformatics and stepped into the field of proteogenomics.
Our lab started the VIB Proteomics Core of which Kris Gevaert is currently the scientific advisor. Amongst others, novel and mature proteomic technologies developed by the Gevaert lab are made available to other researchers via this facility.
For more information, consult our lab website or contact Kris via e-mail .