Advanced Mass Spectrometry Facility

National Institute Of Diabetes And Digestive And Kidney Diseases

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

Historically the facility has supported on the order of 40 PIs each year involved with around 70 annual report level projects with around two-thirds of these projects coming from the NIDDK. Although useful metrics for some things, the PI-count and project-count are oversimplifications. It is important to note that the amount of support provided to each project varies widely. For instance, support of small molecule chemists at NIDDK and a number of projects involving biopolymer analysis at NIDDK were very involved while most of the support provided to non-NIDDK labs involved one or two low staff time experiments. Support of Kenner Rice (NIDA) is a special case as he only recently moved to NIDA from NIDDK and has had a long-standing working relationship with the facility in all its historical forms. In addition to working in direct support of PI projects staff and resources are used to update methodology, adopting new and proven approaches of clear importance to the NIDDK PI community and in a limited number of cases developing new approaches when these are of immediate importance to on-going PI projects and otherwise consistent with the facilitys technical philosophies. During FY2021 staff was essentially full time with John Lloyd providing essential support in several COVID related projects. While Eric supported 4 different COVID projects (from NIAID and NIDDK) most of how work focused on supporting other NIH science as fellows slowly started up their projects etc. Both staff members seem to have needed to cover more needs in the NH community with some of our counterpart facilities not up to full strength even today. The long internal project of developing a reliable XL-MS analysis pipeline progressed with a successful solution of the quantitation problem with an on-going refactoring of software for the inclusion of observations reported by the developers of MaxQuant regarding recognition of DSSO linked peptides' fragmentation events. Moreover we completed acquisition of our LUMOS mass spectrometer with an ETD upgrade made possible from cost recovery income with some supplement from the capital equipment budget.