Advanced Mass Spectrometry Facility

National Institute Of Diabetes And Digestive And Kidney Diseases

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

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. This was the second year that the proteomics related capital equipment and space and single staff member from the sunsetted “Advanced Mass Spectrometry Facility” was associated with the Liver Diseases Branch of NIDDK with the Deputy Chief of the LDB acting as a gatekeeper for projects. While in the main the type of proteomics projects did not change significantly the new arrangement provided much more time for the much smaller number of larger projects being supported. Especially popular this year were proximity ligation type experiments which continued to be supported using isotope based quantitative approach. This experiment type benefits immensely from the precision developed for the main work flow as even modest differences can be suggestive in this method while at the same time because the samples tend to be of only moderate complexity (2-3 thousand proteins) so the performance of our instrument does not compromise the results for most situations. Internally the pursuit of a strong economic rational for modernization as well as improving work efficiency and turn around method development on a low-cost liquid handler continued when project work was not being performed. The conditions of last year's effort had to be abandoned due to a difficulty in improving digestion conditions a new chemical system is now showing promise.