Facilities

The Thermo Scientific* Forma 1800 clean benches provide a Class 100 work area for procedures requiring a particle-free environment. The horizontal laminar airflow clean bench creates a filtered-air environment which reduces contamination, such as keratins, during sample preparation.

The AKTA Pure (GE Life Sciences) is a preparative liquid chromatography system for fast and easy purification of proteins and peptides. This system is used as the first dimension of separation in a typical 2D-LC method where peptides are separated into fractions using strong cation exchange chromatography, prior to LC-MS/MS analysis.

ÄKTA pure is a flexible and intuitive chromatography system for fast purification of proteins, peptides, and nucleic acids from microgram to gram levels of target product.

• Modular system design with a large range of options to allow flexibility in purification of proteins and peptides.
• Customizable system that is easy to upgrade as your research needs develop.
• Reliable system with components and integrated features based on the proven design of ÄKTA avant.
• UNICORN software simplifies your work by providing simple, intuitive, and flexible total system control including drag-and-drop method creation.

Visiprep™ Solid Phase Extraction Vacuum Manifold automates the preparation and cleanup of laboratory liquid samples by solid phase extraction. This step is critical for the removal of interfering chemicals, desalting and concentrating protein/peptide samples into MS compatible solvents. Used with a vacuum pump, a Visiprep manifold can extract up to 12 samples simultaneously, significantly increasing sample throughput while decreasing sample preparation hands-on time. Flow control valves can precisely manipulate flow through each tube and the disposable valve liners virtually eliminate contamination from one sample to the next.

The Thermo Scientific Q Exactive hybrid quadrupole-Orbitrap mass spectrometer combines high-performance quadrupole precursor selection with high-resolution, accurate-mass (HR/AM) Orbitrap™ detection. The Q Exactive™ MS/MS data provides a wide range of qualitative and quantitative applications. Its high scan speed and spectral multiplexing capabilities make it fully compatible with UHPLC and fast chromatography techniques. This instrument is currently connected in-line to a Vanquish UHPLC system and being used for metabolomics and lipidomics workflows.

The Qtrap5500 LC/MS/MS system (AB SCIEX) is designed to excel at detection and confirmation of low-level analytes, and can be specifically used for quantification, verification and validation of  protein/peptide biomarkers. The QTRAP® 5500 system houses a linear ion trap with ultra-fast scan speeds of up to 20,000 Da/s. The flexibility of this system allows a variety of acquisitionmodes, including high-sensitivity full-scan MS, MS/MS, and MS³ capabilities. High-selectivity can be achieved from true triple quadrupole precursor ion (PI) and neutral loss (NL) scans. Accurate and precise quantitation can be obtained by selected reaction monitoring (SRM, also known as Multiple Reaction Monitoring, MRM) using the high-sensitivity triple quadrupole configuration. Furthermore, the QTRAP 5500 is equipped with a differential ion mobility source. This novel SelexION™ Technology device delivers a new dimension of selectivity and performance for applications requiring the separation of isobaric species, elimination of challenging co-eluting contaminants and reduction of high background noise.

Both the VelosPro and the QTRAP 5500 MS/MS systems are equipped with two new liquid chromatography systems manufactured by DIONEX, a company which has pioneered the science of chromatography. These LC systems deliver can deliver flows from 20 nL/min to 10 mL/min and handle a wide range of operating conditions, including ultra high pressure (UHPLC) nanoflow separations, critical for applications in the area of proteomics.

Thermo Scientific Vanquish UHPLC was designed from the ground up to improve performance and repeatability with no trade-offs in quality, robustness, or ease of use. Vanquish Flex excels from method development to routine analyses. With a quaternary pump, the Vanquish Flex offers outstanding performance for targeted LC and LC-MS workflows.

The Agilent 1290 UHPLC is used in combination with MS/MS systems for high flow targeted metabolomic and proteomic workflows. It is equipped with an autosampler, a degassing unit and a quaternary pump module.   

Thermo Scientific Proteome Discoverer software is a flexible, expandable platform for the analysis of qualitative and quantitative proteomics data. Outstanding sensitivity and the rapid growth of public databases have made mass spectrometry the primary method of identifying proteins in complex biological samples. Proteome Discoverer was designed to address this need for flexibility by offering a wide array of bio-software tools and customizable workflows for every proteomics experiment.

CD is an automated solution for the label-free, semi-quantitative differential expression analysis of metabolites.  

Skyline is a Windows client application is used for building MRM quantitative methods and analyzing the resulting mass spectrometer data. It aims to employ cutting-edge technologies for creating and iteratively refining targeted methods for large-scale proteomics studies.