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Mass spectrometry was long considered a specialist technology for physicists and chemists, but is now used across biological research. Two major driving forces of this development are Electrospray Ionization and the Orbitrap mass analyzer. On the occasion of their 30th and 20th anniversaries in 2019, we assembled this collection of Nature Communications articles.
The sections Protein Mass Spectrometry and Beyond Proteins feature applications of Electrospray Ionization- and Orbitrap-based mass spectrometry. The Opinion and Reviews section is continuously updated with Editorials, Commentaries, Perspectives and Reviews on various topics in biological mass spectrometry. As the advances of mass spectrometry are closely connected to the emergence of proteomics, we added a section on The Human Proteome in 2020 to celebrate 10 years of the Human Proteome Project.
Mass spectrometry (MS) enables identification of modified RNA residues, but high-throughput processing is currently a bottleneck. Here, the authors present a free and open-source database search engine for RNA MS data to facilitate reliable identification of modified RNA sequences.
Bacterial tRNA is modified by thiolation of nucleosides. Here the authors identify 2-methylthiocytidine in bacterial tRNA using nucleic acid isotope labeling coupled mass spectrometry. Exposure to methylating agents converts 2-thiocytidine to 2-methylthiocytidine, which is repaired by demethylase AlkB in vivo.
While mass spectrometry-based proteomics largely relies on digesting proteins into peptides, there is no equivalent strategy for polysaccharide analysis. Here, the authors develop a chemical approach to break down poly- into oligosaccharides and present a workflow to identify polysaccharides by oligosaccharide fingerprinting.
Heparan sulfates (HS) contain functionally relevant structural motifs, but determining their monosaccharide sequence remains challenging. Here, the authors develop an ion mobility mass spectrometry-based method that allows unambiguous characterization of HS sequences and structure-activity relationships.
Targeted mass spectrometry enables reproducible and accurate lipid quantification but dedicated software tools to develop targeted lipidomics assays are lacking. Here, the authors develop a targeted lipidomics workbench and lipid knowledgebase for the streamlined generation of targeted assays.
Coupling photochemical derivatization with tandem mass spectrometry enables C=C-isomer resolved lipidomics. Here, the authors further develop this approach into a shotgun lipidomics workflow that allows simultaneous characterization of lipid C=C locations and sn-positions in complex biological samples.
The use of machine learning for identifying small molecules through their retention time’s predictions has been challenging so far. Here the authors combine a large database of liquid chromatography retention time with a deep learning approach to enable accurate metabolites’s identification.
Collision cross section (CCS) information can aid the annotation of unknown metabolites. Here, the authors optimize the machine-learning based prediction of metabolite CCS values and curate a 1.6 million compound CCS atlas, improving annotation accuracy and coverage for known and unknown metabolites.
Flow-injection mass spectrometry (FI-MS) enables high-throughput metabolomic profiling, but ion overload typically limits its sensitivity. Here, the authors show rapid and highly sensitive FI-MS overcoming an overload of the Orbitrap by analyzing sample-specific ion distributions.
Mycobacteria can adapt to the stress of human infection by entering a dormant state. Here the authors show that hypoxia-induced dormancy in M. bovisBCG involves the reprogramming of tRNA wobble modifications and copy numbers, coupled with biased use of synonymous codons in survival genes.
Digital information can be stored in monomer sequences of non-natural macromolecules, but only short chains can be read. Here the authors show long multi-byte digital polymers sequenced in a moderate resolution mass spectrometer. Full sequence coverage can be attained without pre-analysis digestion or the help from sequence databases.
Establishing generic carbohydrate sequencing methods is both a major scientific challenge and a strategic priority. Here the authors show a hybrid analytical approach integrating molecular spectroscopy and mass spectrometry to resolve carbohydrate isomerism, anomeric configuration, regiochemistry and stereochemistry.
It is thought that the chances for discovery of novel natural products increase by screening rare organisms. Here the authors analyse metabolites produced by over 2300 myxobacterial strains and, indeed, find a correlation between taxonomic distance and production of distinct secondary metabolite families.
The biological functions of lipids critically depend on their highly diverse molecular structures. Here, the authors determine the mass-resolved collision cross sections of 456 sphingolipid and glycerophospholipid species, providing a reference for future structural lipidomics studies.
Measuring metabolic fluxes in cellular compartments is a challenge. Here, the authors introduce an approach to infer fluxes in mitochondria and cytosol, and find that IDH1 is the major producer of cytosolic citrate in HeLa cells and that in SDH- deficient cells citrate synthase functions in reverse.
Untargeted metabolomics detects large numbers of metabolites but their annotation remains challenging. Here, the authors develop a metabolic reaction network-based recursive algorithm that expands metabolite annotation by taking advantage of the mass spectral similarity of reaction-paired neighbor metabolites.