NEW YORK – Bruker said on Friday it is collaborating with Utrecht University on mass spectrometry-based approaches to studying protein structure and protein-protein interactions.
The collaboration will work to develop approaches using the company's timsTOF Pro instrument along with crosslinkers, XL-MS software, and the PASEF mass spec workflow to incorporate ion mobility information into structural and protein interaction work.
The work will make use of the PhoX protein crosslinker developed by Utrecht researchers Albert Heck and Richard Scheltema, whose labs are part of the collaboration.
Bruker said that it plans to commercialize the results of the collaboration as solutions for structural protein and protein-protein interaction work.
"We are delighted to work with Bruker on the further development of workflows for XL-MS that take advantage of the speed of PASEF and the unique large-scale, accurate CCS data to enhance the detection of crosslinks in XL-MS," Heck said in a statement. "We are excited by the initial results published in Molecular and Cellular Proteomics and look forward to advancing XL-MS even further. We are also interested in other applications of ion mobility separation and CCS on the timsTOF Pro to glycoproteomics and top-down proteomics."
"I believe the advances made by Heck’s group will make this technique more routinely available for structural biology studies using the timsTOF Pro," said Gary Kruppa, vice president of proteomics at Bruker. "Our collaboration with Utrecht University will accelerate adoption of XL-MS within the broader structural and interaction proteomics community."