Mass Spec Speeds Protein Sequencing

The Journal of Chemical Physics reports that researchers are aiming to selectively ionize molecules for mass spectrometry. The goal is to make protein sequencing a bit faster by combining the nice parts of mass spectrometry (speed) and enzyme digestion (specificity). In current systems, the protein molecule is shattered by a huge blast of energy and the mass of the charged fragments is measured. By understanding how proteins shatter, you can figure out a range of different sequences, which must then be refined by other techniques. This is very fast, but difficult to interpret. Since every chemical reaction involves breaking a bond and (usually) ionizing the fragments, the researchers decided to use pulse shaping to only break a specific bond in the protein backbone. The work holds some promise in speeding up the analysis of huge biomolecules, although still in the early stages.