A. N. Verenchikov, N. V. Krasnov, L. N. Gall
Institute for Analytical Instrumentation RAS, Saint-Petersburg
The work presents a brief historical
review of tandem mass spectrometry (MS-MS), indicating a vast progress
in the field during the last decade. Instrumentation aspects are touched
while describing basic principles of operation as well as analytical characteristics
of the most popular tandems. Various applications of MS-MS in the filed
of life science are overviewed, including drug discovery and proteomics.
The review is mostly concerned with the logics of the field evolution
and a mutual relation between instrumentation and applications. Recent
advances in tandem mass spectrometry as well as revolutional leap in bioinformatics
has made MS-MS the most specific and the most sensitive tool and a tool
of choice for biochemical analysis. In return, life science became
the major customer and a very noticeable driving force in the instrumentation
development. The review highlights the fact that life science deals with
very complex mixtures containing up to 10**6 components in a wide dynamic
range of concentrations, up to 10**6. The nature of biochemical problems
requires even higher sensitivity, specificity and throughput of MS-MS,
and its compatibility with a wide range of separation tools, which is likely
to cause further dramatic changes in MS-MS instrumentation.