Thursday, December 29, 2022

Aptamers, capillary electrophoresis, or MS/MS?

 


You CAN have it all, as proven in this study that is so new it is published in 2023! 


What this group shows is that well designed aptamers (DNA things that are designed to enrich other things -- legitimately you can enrich everything from environmental pollutants through proteins) they can enrich and almost directly analyze what they enriched! 

Why?!?!

You've got me. Actually, I think that most aptamer assays use fluorescence so MS/MS on the back end. MS/MS would allow you to QC that aptamer to see if it really is grabbing what you want it to. In the example they show it looks like their aptamer grabs a couple of things and by MS/MS signal they can work out the ratios of those things. Having an integrated system for QC'ing aptamers or doing quantification on enriched molecules from multi-purpose aptamers sounds a lot easier than digesting each aptamer individually, so this seems like a smart/weird application. 

The MS instrument used was a TripleTOF 4600. 

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