Carmen Fernandez-Metzler, of the Department of Drug Metabolism, Merck Research Laboratories, West Point, Pa., writes to ProteoMonitor:
The June 24, 2002 issue of ProteoMonitor contains a piece on software development for difference analysis of LC-MS data. I thought your readers might be interested to know that they don’t need to wait for such an application to become commercially available. Several mass spectrometer manufacturers, including MDS Sciex, MicroMass, and Thermo Finnigan, have software that does difference analysis. Also, Advanced Chemistry Development has this capability programmed into their MS Manager software.
These applications are most often used in drug metabolism studies and are identified as “Metabolite ID” software, but the process is identical for the proteomics work — difference analysis of LC-MS data with subsequent automated MS/MS analysis. A description of the process can be found in a paper published in Drug Metabolism and Disposition 27, 32-40, 1999 and details of the ACD procedures can be found in a paper published in Analytca Chimica Acta, Volume 446, Issues 1-2, 19 November 2001, pp 465-474.