Mass Spectrometry Exam Questions

Five mass spectrometry exam questions worked out.

MS Meets The Sorcerer's Apprentice

GCMS and the Smell of Old Books

The newest -omics: Digging Into the Science of That Old-Book Smell in the New York Times and Material Degradomics: On the Smell of Old Books in Analytical Chemistry.

Mass Spectrometry Word Cloud

From Wordle using Yahoo Pipes.

Spezify Mass Spectrometry

Another search page mashup.

Driving Biological Discovery Using Quantitative Mass Spectrometry

A lecture by John Yates III of the Scripps Research Institute at the La Jolla Proteomics Conference, July 2, 2008.

Alpha and Beta Calutrons

Contemporary photographs of alpha and beta Calutrons at Oak Ridge.

How a Quadrupole Mass Spectrometer Works

Mickey Laux of Orange Coast College explains how a quadrupole mass spectrometer works.

VisWiki

A Wikipedia mashup.

FT-ICR-MS Magnet Quench

Video of a Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometer magnet quenching with resulting cryogen boil off.

ASMS on Twitter

The American Society for Mass Spectrometry Conference is being "tweeted" on #ASMS. There is even an RSS feed RSS feed. Also see #massspec or search for mass spectrometry.

PerkinElmer Acquires Analytica

PerkinElmer has acquired the electrospray ionization and mass spectrometry technology company Analytica of Branford.

18th IMSC Abstract Deadline

April 30^th is the deadline for abstract submission for the 18th International Mass Spectrometry Conference in Bremen, Germany, August 30 – September 4, 2009.

Slideshare

Slideshare is like Youtube for Powerpoint presentations. For example:

Tandem Mass Spectroscopy Basics

View more presentations from cwebster.

Mass Spectrometry on Linkedin

The social networking site Linkedin has a group for mass spectrometry. Linkedin is similar to FaceBook, but focuses on professional networking.

Mass Spectrometry Hits on Wikipedia

Mass spectrometry on Wikirank

A graphical representation of the popularity of the Wikipedia page on mass spectrometry.

Mass Spectrometry Twitter Feed

Mass spectrometry has a Twitter feed.

Accelerator Mass Spectrometry in Biology and Health Care

Lecture from UCTV.

Electrospray Videos

On Youtube.

Also:

Nanospray : Sweet

Electrospray Ionization with Syringe Pump

Electrospray Taylor Cone

Initiating Nanospray

Tickling the Inlet

MALDI of a Copper Age Mummy

MALDI TOF mass spectrometry has been used to identify the clothing of Ötzi the Iceman (in RCM; hat tip to MW).

Mass Spectrometer Confirms Mars Water

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander thermal and evolved-gas analyzer ( TEGA) has identified water in a mars soil sample.

QTOF Lecture

Raising the bar on scientific presentation production values.

Video Archive: The Mass Spectrometer

A 1988 video from the University of Hertfordshire Science Centre.

A Conversation with Fred W. McLafferty

The Oral History Project of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University has a 90 minute streaming video interview of mass spectrometry pioneer Fred McLafferty (Apple Quicktime required).

Wikipedia Statistics

Here is a site that produces a graph of hit counts for Wikipedia articles. For example mass spectrometry had 43319 hits in February, about one to two thousand hits per day (via).

Rays of Positive Electricity and Their Application to Chemical Analyses

Google Books has a digitized and searchable versions of J. J. Thomson's Rays of Positive Electricity and Their Application to Chemical Analyses both the 1913 Edition as well as the 1921 Edition. There are also downloadable PDFs of the books.

Chromatography Video

Here is another video in need of a mashup.

Computational MS Demo

From the University of California at San Diego.


Update: direct link to above page.

Ion Mobility Separation Animation

A well-crafted animation of ion trapping and mobility separation. It lacks a soundtrack, but it's easy enough to add one.

Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry and the Tour de France

Italian Christian Moreni tested positive for synthetic testosterone with the isotope ratio mass spectrometry procedure.

Cyclotrons, Synchrotrons, Mass Spectrometers, and Cloud Chambers

A physics lecture by Prof. Walter Lewin of MIT.



Launch in external player

Blogroll Cleaning

TIme for a blogroll cleaning. The old blogroll is in the comments.

MALDI Sample Preparation: The Ultra Thin Layer Method

A video tutorial article in the Journal of Visualized Experiments on MALDI sample preparation from Brian Chait's Mass Spectrometry Group at Rockefeller University. JoVE is an online biological sciences video journal.

Really Old Peanuts

Preceramic Adoption of Peanut, Squash, and Cotton in Northern Peru - agriculture, archaeology, and accelerator mass spectrometry.

Protein Synthesis Interpretive Dance

At Stanford University in 1971. Compare to Harvard in 2006.

Mass Spectrometry Videos

• Professor John B. Fenn
• : Agilent 7500ce ICP-MS
• Agilent HPLC-Chip/MS
• Agilent Multimode Source
• Thermo Heated Electropray Ionization Source
• Thermo LXQ Linear Ion Trap
• Thermo TSQ Triple Quadrupole
• Thermo vMALDI Ion Source

(via)

NIH Videocasts on Proteomics

Videocasts of mass spectrometry talks (RSS):

Targeted MS Assays for Biomarkers: Enabling a Biomarker Pipeline, Leigh Anderson, Large Scale Proteomics Corporation

Emerging Role of Mass Spectrometry in Structure Elucidation of Cellular Complexes, Michal Sharon, Cambridge University

Top Down Mass Spectrometry: 2005, N. Kelleher, University of Illinois

Finding Function with Mass Spectrometry in Cancer and Infectious Disease, R. Angeletti, Albert Einstein School of Medicine

New Mass Spectral Strategies for Proteomics and Glycomics , Catherine E. Costello, Boston University

SIMS Video

Pradeep Haldar shows off the University of Albany College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering's SIMS instrument.

LOL Mass Spectrometry

A mashup of Lolcat and MS journal newsfeeds (via; via)

Wikipedia Hegemony

This Reason Magazine article only mentions mass spectrometry tangentially, but illustrates one of the points I tried to make in this poster: Wikipedia can't be ignored if it's the first Google hit in your topic area.

Dinosaurs, Chickens and Mass Spectrometry (Video)

YouTube - Dino Protein is for the Birds

Boris A. Mamyrin: 1919-2007

Boris A. Mamyrin, inventor of the mass reflectron, died March 5, 2007, at the age of 87 in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Mass Spectrometry at FACSS 2007

Abstracts are due April 30 for FACSS 2007. There will be seven half-day oral sessions on mass spectrometry:

• Fundamentals of Electrospray Ionization
• Fundamentals of Laser Desorption Ionization
• Direct Ionization Methods for High Throughput Mass Spectrometry
• Advances in Biomolecular Imaging Mass Spectrometry
• Particle Mass Spectrometry: Techniques and Applications
• Novel Methods for Biological Mass Spectrometry
• Applications of Biological Mass Spectrometry

T-rex Protein Shows Link to Birds

Analyses of Soft Tissue from Tyrannosaurus rex Suggest the Presence of Protein and
Protein Sequences from Mastodon and Tyrannosaurus Rex Revealed by Mass Spectrometry
(via).

MS Flash Simulation

Mass spectrometer Flash simulation at eduMedia.

Mass Spectrometry Wikiality

Along with Wikipedia's mass spectrometry entry, which has risen to become the number one Google hit for mass spectrometry, there are a few other noteworthy Wikimedia projects: mass spectrometry photos and diagrams in Wikimedia Commons, mass spectrometry defined in Wictionary, and mass spectrometry section in a Wikibooks selection on proteomics.

Spectroscopy and Separations Podcasts

Joining the growing number of chemical analysis podcasts: SpectroscopyNow and SeparationsNow podcasts.

Yahoo Pipes Mass Spectrometry

Yahoo Pipes is a service that allows the manipulation of web content to create a remixed version of the information. Here is a mashup of mass spectrometry journal articles. Mass spectrometry journals are fed straight in and journals with mixed content (e.g. Analytical Chemisry) are filtered to pull out the mass spectrometry articles.

Proteomics Clinical Applications

Wiley has launched a new proteomics journal, Proteomics - Clinical Applications aimed at "application of proteomics to the study of human disease and translation to the clinic." A quick browse of the first issue suggest that at least half of the articles will be in some way related to mass spectrometry. Fortunately there is RSS Feed to make it easier to stay up to date.

Moving a Large Instrument

The KATRIN MAC-E Filter travels through Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen (via).

Analytical Chemistry Podcast

Analytical Chemistry joins the growing number of journals with a podcast (an audio introduction).

Spectroscopy Journal Impact Factors

2005 Impact Factor

1 - Mass Spectroscopy Rev. (13.27)
2 - Prog. NMR Spectroscopy (6.46)
3 - J. Anal. Atom. Spectrom. (3.64)
4 - J. Am. Soc. Mass Spectr. (3.63)
5 - J. Mass Spectrometry (3.57)
6 - Rapid Comm. Mass Spectr. (3.09)
7 - NMR in Biomedicine (2.47)
8 - J. Magnetic Resonance (2.42)
9 - Appl. Spectroso. Rev. (2.36)
10 - Spectrochim. Acta B (2.33)

Mass spectrometry is first and hits four of the top six spots (via).

LCMS Finds Cocaine on Euros

This Analyst article on LCMS for the determination of drug contamination on Irish euro banknotes by Jonathan Bones, Mirek Macka and Brett Paull at the Dublin City University National Center for Sensor Research has been getting quite a bit of press. Trace cocaine was found on all 45 bank notes tested. This is perhaps not surprising, given the ease with which the powder is spread by ATMs and counting machines. Nonetheless, the authors report a significant sensitivity improvement in the LCMS method compared to previous GCMS studies.

C60, the Celestial Sphere that Fell to Earth

Here is a video (RealVideo) of a 1995 lecture by Harry Kroto on the discovery of C₆₀. The famous mass spectrum is at the 12 minute mark (via>via).

Mass Spectrometry IDs Fake Fur

It isn't clear what test was performed, but this story about fake fur has been the biggest mass spectrometry item of the past week. One possibility is MALDI MS of keratin, as described in Identification and Quantification of Feathers, Down, and Hair of Avian and Mammalian Origin Using Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption/Ionization Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry by Klaus Hollemeyer, Wolfgang Altmeyer, and Elmar Heinzle, Anal. Chem.; 2002; 74 5960 (ht to Steve Down)

Stardust Mass Spectrometry

Organics Captured from Comet 81P/Wild 2 by the Stardust Spacecraft in the December 15 Science.

Mass Spec Meets YouTube

Clickable CID Spectrum

The Bioanalytical Mass Spectrometry Facility at the University of New South Wales has a peptide collision induced dissociation simulator in which you use a mouse click to break peptide backbone bonds. There is also a sequencing tutorial with study questions.

Proteomics Podcast

The Wiley journal Proteomics has started a podcast. Unfortunately, it isn't formatted for subscription and each audio file must be downloaded individually.

Update: There is now a URL for the podcast that can be used with iTunes or similar software: http://www.wiley-vch.de/vch/journals/2120/podcast/podcast.xml.

MS Biomarker Research to Top $745M

Kalorama Information, a division of MarketResearch.com, is predicting that mass spectrometry in research related to biomarker discovery will exceed $745 Million by the year 2010. The full report can be obtained online for about $3000.

Nier's Mass Spectrograph

Several photos of the 1940 Nier Mass Spectrograph are online at the National Museum of American History. Alfred Nier built this instrument to separate ²³⁵U from ²³⁸U and test the prediction that the former undergoes fission (via).

Element 118 Discovered

A noble gas with 118 protons has been discovered (via).

Todd Wins Aston Medal

Prof. John F J Todd of the University of Kent was awarded the Aston Medal by the British Mass Spectrometry Society.

Who Needs Powerpoint

An excellent Google Video critique of "Determination of Methylmercury, Ethylmercury, and Inorganic Mercury in Mouse Tissues, Following Administration of Thimerosal, by Species-Specific Isotope Dilution GC-Inductively Coupled Plasma-MS ," Qvarnstrom, Lambertsson, Havarinasab, Hultman, & Frech,
Anal. Chem. 2003; 75 4120 using pen, paper and video camera.

C&E News MS Cover Story

Chemical & Engineering News has a cover story on the International Mass Spectrometry Conference last month in Prague.

Wiley Journal Newsfeeds

Wiley InterScience journals now have RSS newsfeeds (marked-up example):

Journal of Mass Spectrometry: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/rss/journal/6043

Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/rss/journal/4849

Mass Spectrometry Reviews: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/rss/journal/49879

Carboxylic Acid Derivatives and Mass Spectrometry

UC Berkeley Professor Peter Vollhardt talks about Carboxylic Acid Derivatives and Mass Spectroscopy in, not one, but two lectures in his Webcast Lecture for Chem 3B - Chemical Structure and Reactivity in Spring 2006 (Real Media).

Peacock GCMS Viewer

Peacock 0.1.7 for Mac OS X is a view and edit program for GCMS files.

The Inner Life of the Cell

A video produced by XVivo for Harvard University's Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. (on StudioDaily and via).

mMass Program

mMass is an open source mass spectrum analysis program written in Python and released under the GNU General Public License. Source code and Windows and Mac binaries are available for download.

Autoflex III Mass Spectrometer

Bruker introduced a new version of the Autoflex at the IMSC in Prague. I first saw this instrument in Barcelona at the IMSC 2000 and it still reminds me of the drones in Silent Running.

Mass Spectrometry Terms Final Draft

The third and final draft (PDF) of the Standard Definitions of Terms Relating To Mass Spectrometry document is up on the MS Terms website. This draft is currently undergoing peer review and will be the last draft before publication. It will also be presented as a poster (PDF) next week in Prague at the International Mass Spectrometry Conference.

Mass Spectrometry and Air Security

An article in the Independent suggests that mass spectrometric detection will be central to future airport security.

Calutron Operator's Story

The Calutron operator in the right foreground of the famous photograph tells her story.

IRMS Used in Tour de France Case

Isotope ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS) is figuring prominently in the Floyd Landis, winner of the Tour de France. Here's an article on Testosterone and Doping Control and another on Detection of Epitestosterone Doping by Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry that have some details on the tests.

Scale Model Hydrogen Atom

An eleven mile wide web page that depicts a hydrogen atom to scale (via).

Scanning Probe Electrospray

Georgia Tech researchers have placed an electrospray source in an AFM tip (via).

Proteomics Lecture on Google Video

The Google Video Clinical Proteomics: Cancer Biomarker Discovery presents a discussion of proteomics in cancer biomarker discovery.



The lecture was presented by Dr. Daniel W. Chan of Johns Hopkins University at the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus in 2005.

GCMS of Absinthe

From Friday's Times-Picayune (and earlier in the New Yorker (PDF) and Wired News): reverse engineering the liqueur absinthe using GCMS.

Nucleic Acids Research Web Server Issue

All of the articles in the Nucleic Acids Research Web Server issue are available (for free) in both HTML and PDF versions. There are 150 papers that describe various web servers that have databases and software for DNA, RNA, protein sequences, protein structure, data mining and many other areas (via).

Alkali Metals and Water

Periodic properties of Group 1 elements.




Science meets reality television meets internet video (via).

NIH Podcasts

The National Institutes of Health has a podcast called NIH Research Radio that have about 20 minutes of NIH research news. You can put the newsfeed in your feed reader and it will remind you when a new show is available or you can download them to your iPod, computer, or other device automagically (with the proper software - links on NIH page).

Google Trends

Google Trends is a new Google search device that plots the number of searches and news references for a particular term over time (via).

Analytical Pulls Out of Spring ACS

The American Chemical Society Division of Analytical Chemistry is pulling out of the 2007 ACS Meeting in Chicago next March. Presentations will be moved to Pittcon in late February, also in Chicago.

Gapminder

Gapminder (now in Google beta) has some excellent animated plots using world political and economic information. This could be a glimpse of the future of scientific data presentation (via).

Acronyms in Mass Spectrometry

Spectroscopy magazine has an updated list of mass spectrometry acronyms.

Harvester Wiki

Hwiki is a new bioinformatics wiki at EMBL.

Mass Spec Photos

Some more mass spectrometry photos showed up on Flickr.

News From the Seattle Meeting

The press releases from the Seattle ASMS meeting are filtering out into the blogsphere (and available as a feed).

Website as Graph (or Art)

Below is a graphical representation of this website rendered using a visualizer applet with the different components of the page represented by colored circles.

(via)

More Mass Spec Cartoons

A few more cartoons about mass spectrometry and related topics (via).

Rays of Positive Electricity, Second Edition

I blogged a while back about Thomson's 1913 Rays of Positive Electricity, which is available on-line in various formats. I recently found that the 1921 Rays of Positive Electricity Second Edition is also available. Thomson notes in the preface that

The hope expressed in the first edition that the method of Positive Rays would be of service in connection with important chemical problems has been fulfilled to a remarkable extent by the researches of Mr. Aston and others on the determination of atomic weights and the detection of isotopes. I am convinced that as yet we are only at the beginning of a harvest of results which will elucidate the process of chemical combination, and thus bridge over the most serious gap which at present exists between Physics and Chemistry.

I am trying out a Wiki version of the 1913 book. It looks good, but the markup is time consuming.

ICP Mass Spectrometry Blog

There is a new blog on ICP MS run by a Florida State University chemistry alum.

Commercial DESI Source

Prosolia is now marketing a retrofit Desorption Electrospray Ionization interface.

Peer Reviewing Wikipedia

One of the most often heard responses to complaints about incorrect information in Wikipedia is "Stop complaining and fix it." But many of those who would be willing to fix it are turned off because Wikipedia can be anti-expert with Byzantine rules of conduct that favor the rude and determined. Fixing Wikipedia doesn't work if your contributions are removed in an edit war. Some people thrive on that kind of contest, but most academics prefer a review by their peers and, when faced with the reality of Wikipedia, choose to opt out.

But the Wikipedia vs. peer review dichotomy is a false one. Since the material on Wikipedia is available through the GNU Free Document License, anyone is free to take any fraction of Wikipedia behind a peer review firewall as long as the peer-reviewed material is itself made available through the GNU FDL. Trying to peer review the several million Wikipedia articles is a Herculean task but peer reviewing the fewer than 100 Wikipedia articles on mass spectrometry is quite reasonable, especially if you are familiar with the Mediawiki software.

I have been using Mediawiki for a few years now and serve my group webpage and MS Terms site with the software. It was fairly easy to create a Mass Spectrometry Wiki and pull the pages from the Wikipedia mass spectrometry category into it. Mediawiki is set up for interwiki links, so it is trivial to direct non-mass spectrometry links from the articles out to Wikipedia. Since I have the administrator password, I am now the Benevolent Dictator of the pages in the Mass Spectrometry Wiki. Since I am pro-expert and anti-anonymous editing, I have the wiki set up so that only logged-in users can edit pages and only existing users can create user accounts. If you are a mass spectrometry expert, contact me and I will set up an account for you with your name and contact information. If you like the Wikipedia way, edit Wikipedia. If you want to be your own Benevolent Dictator, set up your own Mediawiki installation or find a site that does Wiki hosting.

Taken to the extreme, there could be dozens of competing wikis with mass spectrometry or other information and various editing philosophies. In this situation, the goodness of the information is a function of the trust that the reader has in the provider of the information, not the ease with which the information is obtained.

Open Access: ACS and ASMS

BioCurious Blog comments on American Chemical Society President E. Ann Nalley's recent letter arguing against open access to journal articles that report on research funded by the NIH. Nalley objects to the "available after six months" policy, arguing that it will lead to lost revenues. It's still too early to guage the effect on journal profits, but all issues of the Journal of the American Society of Mass Spectrometry are openly availble after one year. The flip side of open access is that it may lead to increased readership and higher impact factor, both of which can increase publisher profits.

Volatiles in Tequila by GC

The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry reports on volatiles and ionic species in Tequila, Mezcal, Sotol, and Bacanora using ion chromatography and GC (via). GCMS and IRMS have also been used for Tequila analysis.

Mass Spectrometry at FACSS

There are just a few more days (April 28th) to submit an abstract for the FACSS meeting in Orlando September 24th through 28th, 2006. This will be the first FACSS with official ASMS participation.

MALDI Beats Electrospray

In a MALDI vs. electrospray GoogleBattle anyway (via).

Wikipedia: Mass-to-Charge Ratio

There is an interesting mass-to-charge ratio discussion on Wikipedia that illustrates a point I brought up in my ACS presentation last month (see also the Nature/Wikipedia/Britanica imbroglio). Wikipedia is open to editing by anyone and is peer reviewed only if ones peers choose to review and edit it. It will be interesting to see whether the scientific community embraces or rejects (or some combination) the open source approach to scientific information on the internet.