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 facility's technical philosophies. At the end of this fiscal year the resources and staff of our small core facility will be separated with the "small molecule unit" moving to the LBC and the "proteomics unit" becoming associated with the Liver Diseases Branch. This reorganization should allow the resources to be used in a more effective manner and should free up more time for each staff scientist's continued efforts to specialize in important areas.