Frederick G. Strathmann

High-end mass spectroscopy innovation is driven by proteomics, leaving scientists in other fields like drug development, environmental analysis, and metabolomics underserved.

The concept of dark omics refers to the significant proportion of uncharacterized molecular features within complex biological samples that are often present yet remain inaccessible or unidentified by conventional analytical techniques. This article explores how ion mobility spectrometry integrated with mass spectrometry (IM‑MS) provides critical solutions to longstanding challenges in accessing these dark regions across metabolomics, proteomics, lipidomics, and emerging areas, such as exposomics.

This article explores the integration of high-resolution ion mobility spectrometry–mass spectrometry (HRIMS-MS) with liquid chromatography (LC) and quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (QTOF-MS) as a comprehensive workflow for PFAS analysis.