Evgenia Shishkova has developed a new protocol that offers step-by-step instructions for preparation of raw blood plasma for liquid chromatography – tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). The technique is simple, robust, and reproducible. The entire transformation only takes 3–4 h. This protocol can be adopted for large-scale studies and automation.
Process is available in STAR Protocols: Rapid preparation of human blood plasma for bottom-up proteomics analysis
Despite the crucial roles of lipids in metabolism, we are still in the early stages of annotating lipid species and their genetic basis. To help in this work, a team of researchers led by Vanessa Linke recently developed LipidGenie, an interactive, query-able resource for lipid identification. The research team used high-resolution liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry to quantify 3,283 molecular features from the liver and plasma of outbred mice. These features were then mapped to 5,622 lipid quantitative trait loci, compiled and cross-referenced to the human genome.
Liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS) delivers sensitive peptide analysis for proteomics but requires extensive analysis time, reducing productivity. A recent paper by Meyer et al. titled “Quantitative shotgun proteome analysis by direct infusion” demonstrated that gas-phase peptide separation using direct infusion–shotgun proteome analysis enabled fast, unbiased proteome quantification without LC, and offered an approach to boost throughput, critical to studies that require analysis of thousands of proteomes.