Mass spectrometry and its applications
to Biological Discovery
Mass spectrometry (MS) is a powerful tool to analyze biomolecules such as metabolites and proteins. Recently, MS-based proteomic analysis has become an essential technology for an in-depth high-throughput Omics analysis including lipidome, metabolome, and proteme, and is now widely used for a variety of applications in biomedical research. For example, potential biomarkers/therapeutic targets for diseases such as pancreatic cancers can be found by quantitatively analyzing proteomes/phosphoproteome of tumor tissues and circulating proteins in bloods from patients with the disease. In addition, genomes and their otherwise unannotated protein-coding genes can be found directly by high-quality MS datasets and subsequent data analyses. Lastly, integration of proteomes and transcriptomes along with other Omics data sets would help understand a complex biology on how genetic information could be transmitted to phenotypic states of biological systems. A few applications will be presented including cancer proteomics and proteogenomics.