Purdue Group Describes Novel Mass Spec Protein Chip Technique

NEW YORK, Aug. 18 (GenomeWeb News) - Researchers at Purdue University are developing a protein biochip machine, the university said Aug. 14.

"This technique, when fully developed, will allow us to take hundreds of proteins from a cell without damaging them," R. Graham Cooks, a professor of analytical chemistry at Purdue, said in a statement. "We can then deposit these proteins in specific locations on a chip, where their functions can be analyzed quickly.

Cooks and colleagues described a part of this technique, a mass spec-based separation technique, in an article published in the Aug. 13 online edition of Science. The technique, called ion soft landing, involves modifying a mass spectrometer so it can collect proteins after separation by depositing the ions onto various locations on the chip's surface.  The process produces pure protein samples, the researchers said.

The article, by Zheng Ouang and colleagues, is entitled "Protein microarrays by Ion Soft Landing: Preparative Mass Spectrometry."