A lot of proteomics today is just measuring protein abundance, right? And now that we have all these cool ways of predicting and matching the relative intensity distributions of fragmented peptides, do we even need to go past unit resolution mass? Or....did someone....just convince us we absolutely needed it all the time....
Yo, I am not a big unit resolution anything fan. I've been stuck on things like - is this a nitrate or a sulfate or a phospho and it's big enough I can't tell what the monoisotopic ion is.
You know - mass spectrometrists probably don't get enough credit for how absolutely bizarre our sense of humor can be about the stuff we do.
Chris posted this paper and it descended into chaos
This is funny because citrulline is such a pain in the ass PTM that even Orbitraps suck at determining what is a citrulline vs what is an M+1 isotope when it's an intact peptide. And you aren't just fragmenting that probably-not-really-citrullinated peptide - you're fragmenting all the crap around it in this big dumb window.
And the whole reason I'm writing this post instead of cleaning my house before my Mom - who will totally tell everyone back home that my house isn't clean?
Spit out my coffee. OMG. It's so great to know a group of people this funny.
Back to the paper - this is super important. We've got people out there measuring proteins with arrays and antibodies - poorly - but rapidly - and some of us are about to lose our lunch money. Maybe we are overdoing it here and there. And ion traps are tough - and easy to build - and fix - and they can be screaming fast. And they can be cheaper to buy and run with those little vacuum pumps. It's totally worth thinking about.
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