If you knew most of the proteoforms - is MS1 alone enough?

 

Okay - so this is really interesting and I may need to sleep on it, but here is the idea - 

Ideally we'd be able to see every proteoform MS1 rapidly and have instruments fast/sensitive enough to sequence them. We can use 2D separations to get there pre- or post- digestion, but in no case are these experiments fast.

What if we tossed the MS1s? Could we still do good biology? I mean....an intact proteoform mass with 600 amino acids is a lot less likely to occur completely at random than a 10 amino acid peptide...

Seems to work, too! The proof of concept appears to be an E.coli proteoform atlas.