SparseQuant

Classical thinking says to do peptide quan right with a mass spec, you need a labeled peptide for each and every peptide that you are doing quan on.  The problem is that this can be crazy expensive.

Label free quan doesn't use require any fancy expensive labels, but the quan is relative and can be difficult to reproduce.

What we need is a compromise.  What if you combined the technology to make it expensive AND difficult to reproduce?  Just kidding!  Would that be a paper good enough for Nature Methods?  Probably, but this is even better.

This new paper in Nature Methods demonstrates the power of integrating just a few labeled peptides and using them for obtaining an improvement in your quan.  Cut the price, but still get better quan than you will see from label free. All the benefits of targeted quan with a whole lot less price!