Special Issues-03-01-2011

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.

This new data-management method is specifically designed to handle the large amounts of data produced in proteomics studies. Experimental methods and data are presented from a recent study conducting proteomics profiling of Schizosaccharomyces pombe to demonstrate the effectiveness of the data management solution. The results demonstrate enhanced data search speeds as well as effective data analysis.

The inclusion of time-resolved selected reaction monitoring (SRM) functionalities into mass spectrometer control software allows large numbers of peptides to be quantified using short LC–MS-MS methods.

The metabolomics workflow described here combines untargeted (discovery) quadrupole time-of-flight (Q-TOF) liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS), targeted (confirmation) triple-quadrupole LC–MS-MS, and sophisticated data mining as an effective means to elucidate metabolite changes.

Increases in vitamin D testing frequency have required more rapid and cost-effective solutions for determining vitamin D levels in plasma. This LC–MS method was adapted for use with core-shell columns to achieve run times of less than 4 min.

Fossilomics uses MS to extract amino acid sequence information from subpicomole quantities of protein and peptide fragments that remain in certain fossil samples. The sequences are compared to databases and validated with search statistics and high-confidence sequences. The validated sequences can then be used to place the fossils on the evolutionary tree.

Click the title above to open the March 2011 issue of Current Trends in Mass Spectrometry, Volume 9, Number 1, in an interactive PDF format.