Diagnosing de novo Parkinson's disease with 1 microliter of CSF!

 

Wow. Okay, there are some limitations here, and I'll get to those, but this is seriously impressive stuff.

Basic idea is simple, though. They got lumbar punches so they could get CSF from Parkinson's and healthy matched control samples. Then they looked at them by MALDI-TOF. And they look very different.

The real limitation here is that they used a 7T FTICR. I'm not even sure if there is one of those in my whole state. You could argue that sample size is pretty small, but there ain't exactly a ton of people just lining up for lumbar punches.

On that magnet they get about 200,000 resoluton at 200 m/z. And they are looking in the metabolite / neurotransmitter mass ranges so they pretty much maintain this awesome level of resolution across the whole thing. While this is super cool, the next question is obviously - OMG - can you do this on the hundreds of clinically approved MALDI-TOF instruments out there in the world already? Things like the biotyper probably get (and I'm guessing and too lazy to look it up) about 15,000 resolution? Or is this something we need the higher resolution systems for? Either way super cool work.