Kate Yu

Non-targeted metabolite profiling by ultrahigh-performance liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (UHPLC–MS) is a powerful technique to investigate the influence of genetic and environmental influence on metabolic phenotype in plants. The approach offers an unbiased and in-depth analysis that can reveal molecular markers of desirable phenotypic traits which can be complementary to genetic markers in plant breeding efforts. Here, the power of non-targeted metabolite profiling is illustrated in a study focused on the determination of molecular markers in malting barley that are predictive of desirable malting quality for brewing applications.

The use of a mass spectrometer in quantitative analysis exploits its exquisite selectivity and sensitivity as a detector, allowing a signal to be ascribed to a particular chemical entity with high certainty, even when present in a sample at a low concentration. There are, however, some special considerations that are necessary when a mass spectrometer is used as a quantitative tool.

The quantification of proteins in a complex biological sample is an important and challenging task. Mass spectrometry (MS) is increasingly used for this purpose, not only to give a global survey of the components and their amounts, but also to precisely and accurately quantify specific target proteins.

In this article, we discuss radical MS, an increasingly important area of MS development and the application to bioanalysis. At the current stage, most of the research is performed by a small set of academic groups; it is likely that these types of fundamental studies will attract more attention and even be commercialized in the near future.

The potential to accurately and rapidly measure hundreds of individual molecular species provides novel opportunities for food science and nutrition. For food and nutrition researchers, metabolomics, the screening of small-molecule metabolites, enables the molecular fingerprinting of food components. This article describes the various applications, strategies, and tools related to metabolomics in food analysis.

Correlating biological activity with chemical composition is the Holy Grail of natural product chemists. Is mass spectrometry the right tool for this challenge?

In this instalment, a way of utilizing HR-MS systems to characterize the structures of metabolites is introduced. This results in a general workflow for metabolism studies for drug discovery and development.

This article looks at how hydrogen-deuterium exchange mass spectrometry (HDX-MS), an MS-based labelling approach, has begun to serve as a means for performing routine biophysical analysis.

MS: The Practical Art Editor Kate Yu interviews Fred McLafferty about his pioneering career in mass spectrometry.

A systematic approach for the identification of nontargeted species using nominal and accurate mass data searching both mass spectral and "spectral-less" databases is described.

MS: The Practical Art Editor Kate Yu interviews Fred McLafferty about his pioneering career in mass spectrometry

An interview with Fred McLafferty, professor emeritus at Cornell University, about his pioneering career in mass spectrometry

This instalment provides a brief overview of some multidimensional approaches targeted at intact protein analysis for life science applications, particularly for biopharmaceutical analysis.

Innovative technologies are rapidly helping to measure the numerous and diverse lipids present in biological samples. In this second and final instalment of the series, the authors present and discuss the use of these technologies for lipid analysis.

This two-part column explains how lipids analysis has evolved and the variety of techniques and approaches currently used in lipidomics, including their advantages and disadvantages, such as sample preparation, separations and, of course, mass spectrometry.

Most plants used in traditional Chinese medicine must be processed before their medicinal usage; hence the effective ingredients may differ from those in the freshly harvested plant extracts. In this work, we present a fast and generic approach using sub-2-?m liquid chromatography–time-of-flight–mass spectrometry (sub-2-?m-LC–TOF-MS) coupled with multivariate statistical data analysis to systematically profile ingredient changes between fresh and processed samples of huang jing.

An effective metabolite identification study should ideally include both qualitative and quantitative information that for both identifying metabolites, and determining the rate of clearance and the metabolic routes of the parent drug. Liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS) is considered the standard analytical technique for metabolite identification studies. To date, however, qualitative and quantitative information has always been obtained from two separation platforms: quadrupole time-of-flight (QTof) MS for the exact mass full-scan qualitative study, and tandem quadrupole MS for the multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) quantitative study. With advancements to QTof instrumentation, specifically, recent improvements in sensitivity and dynamic range, it is now possible to perform both qualitative and quantitative experiments on a single QTof mass spectrometer. This article describes a workflow that allows simultaneous qualitative and quantitative metabolite identification studies to be..

Both Chinese ginseng and Korean ginseng are similar plant species and undergo similar handling procedures when harvested and processed for sale. Despite their similarities, Korean ginseng commands a higher price than Chinese ginseng on the open market and is believed to produce different clinical effects than Chinese ginseng. Chinese researchers are now employing new techniques on the two varieties of ginseng to understand their chemical differences. HPLC/UV-based strategies for distinguishing the two types of ginseng have proven to be mostly ineffective due to lack of resolution. Using UltraPerformance liquid chromatography/orthogonal acceleration (oa)–TOF mass spectrometry and exact mass measurement, the authors developed a high-resolution method using multivariate statistical analysis for separating and identifying differences between Chinese ginseng and Korean ginseng at the molecular level.

The authors compare fast LC}MS with a flow injection analysis}MS method for effective quantitation in the high-throughput environment of today's drug discovery laboratories.

The authors investigated the two most popular types of interfaces for benchtop LC–MS systems – the particle interface and the atmospheric-pressure ionization interface – to learn how the information obtained separately from the two can be complementary.