Advanced precursor ion selection strategies on an LTQ Orbitrap!

I'll be honest, when I found this paper I was looking for the answer to a completely different mystery. However, this awesome paper goes a long way toward answering a question that's been rumbling around in my head for a while -- that is: how hard could you push an LTQ-Orbitrap system?

3 paragraphs dedacted due to excessive rambling....

What if you could get around that awesome mustard yellow interface and into the guts of the operating software. Could you write better, smarter instrument control software and crank that monster to 11?

Yeah -- this awesome study suggests there is definitely some room for improvement!

This team totally hacks and Orbitrap XL -- and drastically improves it's performance! 200ng of HeLa ran 8 times they get around 1,600 unique proteins (single shot top 10, 2 hour gradient). Honestly, that's pretty good and smokes any Q-TOF or Ion Trap I've ever personally used.

When they modify their instrument parameters to do cool things like better control dynamic exclusion -- and to automatically exclude peptides identified in the previous runs using their cool method (Smart MS2) they can get that number up to ~2,500 unique protein groups in 4 runs. Wow, right?

And if you're thinking "who cares, I'm no Russian hacker" check this out!

You can buy SmartMS2 for your LTQ Orbitrap!  (please see the disclaimer's section of this blog, it is way over to the right somewhere at the top. I am not endorsing this product. I have not used this product. This is a semi-scientific review of the literature only, and mentioning the fact that this thing is out there falls in line with the general story of this paper and blog review thing. And someone reading the paper would find out anyway!)