Sample Preparation in Biological Mass Spectrometry
The goal and philosophy of sample preparation in biological mass spectrometry is to reveal the actual multicomponent molecular structure of a biological specimen that can be assessed by mass spectrometry tools. Unfortunately, sample preparation is often l
- PDF / 28,332,420 Bytes
- 1,081 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 63 Downloads / 217 Views
Alexander R. Ivanov · Alexander V. Lazarev Editors
Sample Preparation in Biological Mass Spectrometry
123
Editors Alexander R. Ivanov Harvard School of Public Health Harvard University Department of Genetics and Complex Diseases Huntington Avenue, SPH-1 665 02115 Boston Massachusetts USA [email protected]
Alexander V. Lazarev Pressure BioSciences, Incorporated Research and Development Norfolk Avenue 14 02375 South Easton Massachusetts USA [email protected]
ISBN 978-94-007-0758-0 e-ISBN 978-94-007-0828-0 DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0828-0 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2011928676 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Preface
Materialistic Dualism of Sample Preparation: Boring but Important!
On two occasions I have been asked,—“Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” . . . I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.
During the past several decades tremendous investments have been made to develop analytical technologies in biology, chemistry and in other related disciplines. Biological samples in particular have received a lot of attention fueled by the increased focus in biomedical research. It seems that analytical technologies are approaching the limits of sensitivity and resolution relevant to biomedical research; computer hardware and data analysis algorithms are becoming ever more powerful every year, allowing individual researchers to complete in a month or two projects only large institutions could have dreamt about a couple of decades ago. It is commonly overlooked, however, that most analytical technologies cannot accept biological samples as they exist in vivo, therefore, elaborate manipulations must precede the actual analysis step to transform samples into a form suitable as input for a given analytical instrument. Applications of biological mass spectrometry (MS) span across several different areas including proteomics, genomics, metabolomics, pharmacokinetics, tissue imaging, etc. Novel applications continue to be developed in areas such as environmental monitoring and ecology. Moreover, mass spectrometry is finally entering into clinical diagnostics and epigenetics. The task of describing sample preparation for biological MS is even more confusing because there is no commonly agreed upon definition of the very concept of “sample preparation”. For some