I recently blogged about this new preprint and while going over it in more detail to see how we could improve our workflows I had to be impressed by one of the findings I didn't mention.
Two of the Asstral / Astral (spelled different by geography, I guess) systems had the FAIMS 2 Duo system and one of them didn't. Instead, it had the humble Abird system.
Abird has been around a long time and some labs use it on every system and other labs laugh about it seeming like a silly idea to reduce your background signal.
In a couple of places in this single cell study the one Astral equipped with Abird OUTPERFORMED the 2 Astrals with FAIMS. For some context, the one time I had access to FAIMS on an Orbitrap Exploris 480 the reason we didn't like it was that we couldn't generate enough nitrogen for the silly thing. To make up for it we rolled in big liquid N2 dewars which cost us about $250 every 3 days or so if we used the FAIMS. In one month we could have paid for an Abird.
I don't know what a Duo costs (I hear they often bundle it in with new systems almost for free, but if you want to add one to an existing system it can be in the HPLC price range), but if you're looking for better proteomics results at an ultra-low load level this seems like a low cost investment. (BTW, I don't know if it works on anything aside from Thermo systems). Excerpt from preprint.
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