Mass spectrometry: an old dog with new tricks
It’s an understatement to say that biology is complicated. In our latest Tech News, we spoke to Albert Konijnenberg, Product Manager in Integrative Structural Biology at Thermo Fisher Scientific (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) about mass spectrometry (MS), and how the 100-year-old technique is being used to shed new light on one of the newer aspects of biological complexity scientists are looking to unravel – protein—protein interactions (PPIs).
Critical to an organism’s function at the molecular level, PPIs have been crucial to our understanding of SARS-CoV-2 and are also involved in various diseases such as Alzheimer’s, holding interest as attractive drug targets. In the last few years, there has been a trend towards researchers combining MS with traditional structural biology techniques such as cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET), to attempt to visualize proteins in their native environment.
