Bruker Daltonics announced today that it has established a collaboration with the Mass Spectrometry Resource laboratory of Professor Catherine Costello at the Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM). The collaborative effort will focus on the application of high performance ion trap mass spectrometry and Fourier Transform Mass Spectrometry (FTMS) to glycomics and proteomics applications. The researchers at the Boston University School of Medicine are already using the recently introduced Bruker amaZon^TM ion trap mass spectrometer for detailed and high throughput analyses of glycan structures, and have just ordered a solariX^TM FTMS with a 12 Tesla magnet for high performance bottom-up and top-down proteomics and glycomics with ETD and ECD capabilities.

Professor Costello is a Research Professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Chemistry, and the Director of the BUSM Center for Biomedical Mass Spectrometry. Her laboratory is a resource center sponsored by the NIH where mass spectrometry is applied to the study of biopolymers (proteins, carbohydrates and lipids) by local, national and international collaborators. The recent award of an NIH-NCRR High-End Shared Instrumentation Grant to the BUSM Center provided the funds for purchase of the solariX. Professor Costello and her group are recognized internationally as experts in the analysis of the complex structures of carbohydrates and their conjugates, such as glycoproteins and glycolipids. While these important classes of molecules are involved in immune system recognition, nervous system development, and many other critical biological processes, methods for their full structural characterization are less developed than for linear biopolymers such as proteins and oligonucleotides. Not only are the structures of carbohydrates more complex, because of their non-linear, branched structures, but they usually occur in complex mixtures.

The recently introduced Bruker solariX FTMS provides the highest mass resolving power and mass accuracy available on any mass spectrometer, making it ideally suited to tackle extremely complex mixtures. Additionally, the solariX offers the most versatile suite of tools for fragmenting biopolymers, including Collision Induced Dissociation (CID), either in the front-end collision cell and/or in the ICR cell, as well as Electron Capture Dissociation (ECD) in the ICR cell, and now even front-end Electron Transfer Dissociation (ETD).