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Quantitative analysis of peptides and proteins in biomedicine by targeted mass spectrometry

Abstract

Targeted mass spectrometry (MS) is becoming widely used in academia and in pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries for sensitive and quantitative detection of proteins, peptides and post-translational modifications. Here we describe the increasing importance of targeted MS technologies in clinical proteomics and the potential key roles these techniques will have in bridging biomedical discovery and clinical implementation.

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Figure 1: Comparison of conventional data-dependent analysis to targeted MRM-MS on a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer.
Figure 2: Protein and peptide enrichment strategies to increase sensitivity and specificity of analyte detection in SID-MRM-MS.

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Acknowledgements

We thank L. Gaffney for her help with graphics. This work was supported in part by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and by grants from the US National Cancer Institute (U24CA160034, part of the Clinical Proteomics Tumor Analysis Consortium initiative, to S.A.C.) and National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (HHSN268201000033C and R01HL096738 to S.A.C.). S.A.C. and M.A.G. acknowledge the financial support of the Women's Cancer Research Fund of the Entertainment Industry Foundation and the Komen Foundation for funding portions of this work.

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Correspondence to Steven A Carr.

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Gillette, M., Carr, S. Quantitative analysis of peptides and proteins in biomedicine by targeted mass spectrometry. Nat Methods 10, 28–34 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2309

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