Mass Spectrometry

One critical area of proteomics is defining the proteome. What proteins are present at any given moment will change as cells sense and respond to changes in their environment. There are several methods for submitting proteins to identifcation but the most powerful to date is mass spectrometry (MS). Proteins are sent into a pair of tandem MS devices (MS/MS). The proteins are sorted and groups of proteins of similar mass to charge ratio (m/z) are sent on to be inoized and characterized to determine the identiy of each protein. This process is automated so that 1000's of proteins can be identified for each experiment.

The animation below will walk you through the process. It was a part of a larger set of web pages hosted at the University of Washington.

Use the buttons at the top right to control the animation.

More information about MS/MS can be found at this URL.

This animation was created by Dr. John Yates of Department of Cell Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, LaJolla, CA
who has given permission to use the animation.