This story originally ran on April 29 and has been updated.

Despite an environment that is shaking out to be one of the most challenging for the mass spectrometry business in recent memory, vendors are continuing to push out new instruments.

This week, Bruker became the latest vendor to bring a new instrument to market, launching its ultrafleXtreme MALDI-TOF/TOF, the "fastest and most flexible" MALDI-TOF/TOF instrument. In doing so, it joined Waters and Applied Biosystems, who have launched new platforms this year even as early indications suggest that the instruments could be facing a year-long slump.

Waters started the year by launching the Xevo Q-TOF in January [see PM 01/15/09]. Applied Biosystems, a division of Life Technologies, followed up with its introduction of the AB Sciex TOF/TOF 5800 earlier this month [see PM 04/09/09]. And at next month's conference of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, which has been a perennial launching pad for new systems, more mass spec launches, especially from the remaining top-5 vendors, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Agilent Technologies, could be in the works.

Through a spokesman, Bruker declined to comment about the launch. In a press release, the company said that the ultrafleXtreme incorporates the company's proprietary smartbeam-II laser technology at 1 kHz to enable "ultra-high" data acquisition speed in both MS and MS/MS at full system performance. The smartbeam laser with the 1kHz repetition rate was specifically developed in house for the new instrument, Bruker said in a technical note, and delivers constant high output energy-independent of the selected repetition frequency across long acquisition.

"This is indispensable for series of MALDI imaging or LC-MALDI runs," Bruker said.

The instrument, according to the company, is the only MALDI-TOF/TOF platform that combines "true" 1 kHz speed in both TOF and TOF/TOF modes with "ultra-high performance and extreme flexibility for a broad variety of complementary research, clinical, and applied proteomics applications."

A new FlashDetector combined with a new 4 GHz digitizer and new electronics give the instrument mass resolving power of up to 40,000 and 1 ppm mass accuracy. That resolving power, along with Bruker's PAN technology, allows for the highest mass resolution across a "very broad mass range, not just as a selected optimum," enabling precision proteomics, it said.

In its technical note, Bruker said that the ultrafleXtreme outperformed the company's ultraflex III, ABI's 4800 Plus MALDI-TOF/TOF, and Thermo Fisher's MALDI Orbitrap across the entire peptide mass range.

Bruker added that the ultrafleXtreme also had greater resolution than ABI's 5800 TOF/TOF based on data from the instrument brochure.

And the ultrafleXtreme enables laser focus diameters down to 10 micrometers "for high spatial resolution imaging without pixel overlap." This allows spectral quality and signal intensity to be maintained even at the smallest laser beam diameters, the company said.

In a statement, Ian Sanders, the vice president of Bruker Daltonics, the division that houses the company's mass-spec operation, said that with the ultrafleXtreme, researchers will be "enabled for new achievements in proteomics and MALDI imaging, while achieving result quality across the board that would have been undreamed of even a short time ago."

Jumping into an Abyss, or Jumpstarting Sales?

In any given year, the leading mass spec vendors will introduce new mass-spec platforms, but what is noteworthy about the instruments that have hit the market this year so far is their timing: Though all segments of the life-science market are being battered by the economic downturn, the mass-spec business is viewed as one of the more vulnerable.