Agilent Technologies, Applied Biosystems, Bruker Daltonics, Thermo Electron, GE Healthcare, and Waters all released new products at ASMS 2004 in Nashville, Tenn. this week (see table, p. 3). Bruker Daltonics and Waters released new mass specs: Bruker released the ultrOTOF Q, a new Q-TOF to replace its old BioTOF Q ESI Q-q-TOF. Waters released its new Q-TOF Premier, as well as the MALDI Micro MX benchtop MALDI. Waters also released an updated version of its UPLC technology for proteomics applications, called nanoACUITY. Agilent released its HPLC-Chip MS, a chip-based LC designed to replace traditional HPLC. ABI released new iTRAQ reagents, ICAT-like stable isotope labels for peptide analysis. Thermo and GE healthcare released an integrated MDLC-LTQ that combines GE Healthcare’s Ettan MDLC and Thermo’s LTQ. This is the first integrated product offering following GE’s acquisition of Amersham earlier this year (see story, p. 5).
Steamboat Springs, Colo.-based start-up Efeckta Technologies released its first commercially available mass spec analysis software, called ProTS-Data, at ASMS 2004 this week. ProTS does automated analysis of raw data associated with mass spec-based proteomics research, according to the company.
The software is different from competing products, the company said, because it uses proprietary algorithms that can remove noise.
The company is gearing the product toward those who are not mass spec experts, Efeckta operations officer John Mattheson told ProteoMonitor. “Visual inspection of all peaks that matched to potential peptides showed that ProTS-Data and manual assignment yield similar lists and provided more accurate search results when compared to other software,” LeeAnn Higgins of the University of Minnesota said in a statement.