Friday 3 September 2010

Biomolecular mass spectrometry: top names gather for conference

Waters Corporation and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) will bring together some of the world’s leading life science researchers and practitioners of mass spectrometry (MS) at a conference next week to discuss the ways they are applying time-of-flight mass spectrometry to complex biomolecule research and analysis.


Waters today announced the agenda and presentation topics for the Applications of Time of Flight Mass Spectrometry Conference, which will held at The Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, from September 13-15.

“This meeting provides an excellent platform for review and discussion of the most current theories and applications in time-of-flight mass spectrometry,” said Brian Smith, VP Mass Spectrometry Operations, Waters Division. “The conference will bring together leaders with specialties in areas such as proteomics, chemistry and pharmacology, all of whom are gathering to share ideas and advance research.”

Meeting attendees and presenters hail from some of the most prestigious academic and industrial laboratories. Twenty-five presentations will be given on topics such as quantitative proteomics, drug discovery, probing protein conformation, protein complexes, metabolites, lipids and glycoproteins.

Waters scientists are presenting at the Applications of Time of Flight Mass Spectrometry Conference. Copies of their presentations will be available for downloading from the Waters website shortly after the meeting concludes.

• Practical and Theoretical Constraints upon System-wide Protein Quantification by LC-MS , James Langridge.

• Characterization of Protein Therapeutics by Ion-mobility Time-of-flight Mass Spectrometry, Weibin Chen.

• Use of OA Login and OA Toolkit for Walkup Open Access Accurate Mass LC/MS, John Van Antwerp.

• Development of a Lipidomic Platform Based on a Hybrid Quadrupole Time-Of-Flight (QTof) Ion-Mobility Mass Spectrometer for Both Targeted And Non-targeted Analysis, John Shockcor.

Waters benchtop and research-grade time-of-flight (Tof) and quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometers (QTof) – the Waters Xevo, Synapt HDMS mass spectrometers, and LCT Premier – are instruments known for their ability to elucidate the structure of biomolecules – be they individual proteins, protein complexes, protein metabolites, protein biomarkers. Their ability to make exact mass measurements – pinpointing a molecular ion’s mass-to-charge ratio to four decimal places – makes Tof mass spectrometers a favorite for identifying unknown molecules and assigning them a structure.

Recent advances in technology are making Tof mass spectrometers more capable of quantifying proteins in samples enabling scientists to perform qualitative and quantitative experiments in a single analysis, something that was virtually impossible to do a few years ago.

Waters Corporation