Electronic Mailing list Update



The ABRF electronic mailing list was started early last summer on a pilot scale in order to establish a simple and effective means of communications among the membership by Ruth Hogue Angeletti (Albert Einstein College of Medicine). Subscription to the mailing list was opened to the full ABRF membership through announcements at the Protein Society Symposium in San Diego, the Methods in Protein Structure Analysis Meeting in Utah, the Biological Mass Spectrometry Meeting in San Francisco, and via the September 1994 issue of ABRF News. As of February 1994, there are 230 participants. Although a few participants are novices, many more are very experienced and knowledgeable scientists in both protein/peptide and nucleic acid chemistry. There are several corporate members as well. We now have participants not only in the USA, but in Canada, Australia, and western Europe.

The mailing list works very simply and requires only that you check your e-mail. A question or other message sent to the e-mail address at abrf@aecom.yu.edu will be forwarded to all participants. Replies or comments are sent to the same address and redistributed once again to all participants. In the past months as the number of mailing list participants has increased, question and answer activity has begun to flourish. Most questions have received several answers, often with references, and sometimes with offers of additional materials. Some recent questions that have received helpful answers have dealt with: storage of phosphoramidite reagents, best methods for packing capillary HPLC columns in your own laboratory, availability of a non-amino acid Fmoc intermediate for peptide synthesis, effects of residual Hg from deprotection of Acm-Cys on HPLC columns, instrument problems, judgment on utility of a particular instrument upgrade, use of prepared acrylamide solutions for automated DNA sequencers, identification of unusual peaks in protein sequencing, sequencing of phosphorylated peptides and glycopeptides, and selection of matrices for MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry. Several job openings have also been announced, and †mit Yźksel usually notifies everyone when he posts new information at the ABRF Gopher site. When one mailing list participant expressed complaints about his instrument, the manufacturer responded by sending a senior representative to the laboratory to solve the problem. Another discussion of alternatives to manufacturer-provided solvents led to the revelation of an instrument problem that had plagued a number of laboratories.

If you have not yet joined the electronic mailing list and wish to, just send a message to: abrf-request@aecom.yu.edu. After you have joined, send your questions and replies to: abrf@aecom.yu.edu.


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Created: 27th July 1995
Last modified: 27th July 1995