[Application of bio-mass spectrometry in cellular signal transduction]

The quickly developing techniques of biological mass spectrometry (bio-MS) in recent years realized the high throughput identification of proteins by determining the accurate mass values of trypsin digested peptides and the randomly selected peptide sequence tags, and have been successfully used in the studies of protein interactions and post-translational modification such as the phosphorylation. Compared to the conventional approaches, the above techniques can identify all the phosphorylated proteins (including their phosphorylated amino acid sites) involved in a multi-signal pathway in a single experiment, and they have been developed into a hot-spot of proteomics. The three strategies for the application of bio-MS in the above fields are briefly reviewed.