This year's Nobel Prize for Chemistry went to three scientists who were instrumental in the development of two key analytical methods for studying biological macromolecules.

John B. Fenn and Koichi Tanaka shared one half of the Prize for their contributions to mass spectrometry (MS), and the other half was awarded to Kurt Wüthrich who made it possible to use NMR on proteins.

The Nobel Assembly awarded the Prize “...for the development of methods for identification and structure analyses of biological macromolecules.” In addition, MS, by enabling the identification of the different proteins in a sample, and NMR, by determining the structure of these proteins in solution, have helped to lay the foundations for the field of proteomics.

Fenn and Tanaka developed two alternative principles — electrospray ionization and soft laser desorption, respectively — that made the use of macromolecules in MS possible by creating freely hovering proteins.

Fenn was lauded by one of his former Ph.D. students, Matthias Mann (Odense University, Denmark), who is one of the leaders in the proteomics field. “He developed the technique on a shoestring and many people at the time didn't believe he could do it.”, said Mann (Nature Science Update, 7 October).

Kurt Wüthrich has been pushing the boundaries of protein- and nucleic-acid-structure determination by NMR for the past 35 years, and is still very much at the forefront of NMR. His most recent challenge has been to tackle large protein complexes that defy the 40–50-kDa size limit for structure determination by NMR.