Lipids join the post-genomic era

The global analysis of biomolecules such as proteins, lipids and carbohydrates within a tissue, cell or organelle under specific physiological situations is a major challenge of the post-genomic era. Experts from the fields of proteomics, lipidomics and metabolomics discussed this challenge at a recent meeting on these topics in Bonn.Our ability to determine large numbers of proteins from a biological sample has dramatically increased through the development of soft-ionization techniques and the growing availability of state-of-the-art mass spectrometers, even in non-specialist laboratories. One of the pioneers in applying mass spectrometry to biomolecules, Franz Hillenkamp (University of Münster, Germany), gave an excellent introduction to the basic mechanisms of matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI). He discussed the use of MALDI-MS for the imaging of biological tissue and proposed the use of infrared-laser rather than the more commonly used UV-lasers for this aim. Using this different setting, the critical matrix preparation step can be avoided and analytes can be directly ionized, thereby preventing artificial results. Boris Macek (Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Munich, Germany) gave an introduction to electrospray-ionization (ESI) mass spectrometry and described the use of high-resolution Fourier-transform mass spectrometers to perform top-down mass spectrometry of intact proteins and high-throughput analysis of whole proteomes. In both instances, internal calibration on an ion with a known mass (known as the lock mass) resulted in a resolution power of more than 60.000 and mass deviations of less than 2 ppm. This new degree of accuracy will boost the level of confidence with which proteins can be identified and is therefore crucial for future proteomic research. Alexandre Shvartsburg (Pacific NW National Laboratory, Richland, USA) showed that the analysis of ions using field-asymmetric waveform ion-mobility spectrometry (FAIMS) in conjunct