Abstract: The present invention relates to a novel method for identifying marker sequences for rheumatoid arthritis, the novel marker sequences discovered with the aid of the method, and the diagnostic use thereof. The invention also relates to diagnostic devices containing such marker sequences for rheumatoid arthritis, in particular a protein biochip or beads (pellets), and use thereof.

Abstract: The present invention relates to a method and to a system (100) for predicting the primary structure of biopolymers, especially of proteins and peptides, in which at least two algorithms or the results of at least two algorithms and/or of bioinformatic analyses are combined in order to increase the significance of the results. The system (100) comprises a user interface (UI) for configuring and outputting the results as well as a database interface (DBI) with the databases (DB1, DB2) containing, for example, known amino acid sequences, and with which algorithms for bioinformatic sequences can be actuated.

Abstract: The present invention relates to a method for elucidating the primary structure of biopolymers, in which a biopolymer to be investigated is cleaved into fragments and, after that, subjected to a mass spectrometric analysis (20) resulting in mass spectra being obtained, and in which known algorithms, are used for a first sequence analysis (30) of the fragments in order to determine a primary structure of the biopolymer using the mass spectra. The mass spectra are classified in dependence on results of the first sequence analysis (30), resulting in at least one first spectrum class, to which a known biopolymer can be assigned, and one second spectrum class, to which no known biopolymer can be assigned, being obtained. A further analysis (50) of mass spectra of the second spectrum class is carried out in dependence on the known biopolymer.