Friday, August 22, 2014

Perform imaging analysis on a Q Exactive?!?!?!

Guess what I did this week!  Wait...I guess if you read the subject line you have an idea....

I got to hang out all week with the very nice team of scientists at Protea Biosciences in the beautiful mountains of West Virginia.  Not heard of Protea?  Me neither!  But I expect that they will rapidly be something that we'll be talking about, in part, because of this thing:

Despite it's appearance it is not, in fact, a refrigerator/toaster oven combo.  I got to play with a beta model that was open so I could see exactly what it was doing at all times.


Yes.  That is attached to a Q Exactive!  And that light inside is for the camera that directs the LASER.  I'm not going to lie and say I'm some laser ionization expert.  I'm not.  But I've spent some time on a MALDI-Orbi XL and a Rich Helm's MALDIs, but I got a crash course in it this week, and this was the most badass one I've seen.  The source is a LAESI and you can read about it at wikipedia here.  The team here has this source running on all sorts of samples.  I was just there to see if we could fine tune the Q Exactive to get even better data.  It was cool because we could get about 3 second laser pulses on our controls.  The trick was optimizing cycle time in the Q Exactive so that we could optimize every single millisecond.

Definitely a different way of thinking.  But if you think about the Q Exactive, and assume that this source can ionize virtually anything and consider those implications.  On the QE we can run, at maximum, about 13Hz. If we multiplex, this gives us a chance to monitor as many about 65 compounds per second via targeted SIM or targeted MS2 (PRM; btw, I'm considering practicality.  We can multiplex 10 compounds in the QE, but 5 is easy.  10 is trickier).  If we're just going for detection, the LAESI-QE compound can probably SIM or PRM about 150 molecules per 3 second laser pulse (we were optimizing with small molecule drug mixtures!)

What else did we do?  We worked most of yesterday optimizing native protein and top-down.  Cause the LAESI can zap native proteins right out of tissue, right off a slide, right from where you want it from.  Point to the area on the microscope and ZAP (it didn't actually make a noise...) native protein MS!  We were even able to get nice top down data on our intact native protein using the LAESI by using multiplexing on the QE to fragment multiple charge states from the isotopic envelope.  Did I mention that my week was really cool?

Anyway, this source can be put onto just about anything but, honestly, what is cooler than having imaging capabilities on the world's favorite mass spec?

BTW, imaging isn't all this lab does.  They have a really exceptional team of mass spectrometrists with experts in virtually anything you can think of from molecule elucidation through quantitative proteomics and everything in between.  (Can you tell I was  impressed this week?)

TL/DR:  You probably know about this already, I didn't, but check out Protea here!

0 comments:

Post a Comment