Protein identification using nano liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry

Tandem mass spectrometry is an efficient technique for the identification of peptides on the basis of their fragmentation pattern (MS/MS scan). It can generate individual spectra for each peptide, thereby creating a powerful tool for protein identification on the basis of peptide characterization. This important advance in automatic data acquisition has allowed an efficient association between liquid chromatography and tandem mass spectrometry, and the use of nanocolumns and nanoelectrospray ionization has dramatically increased the efficiency of this method. Now large sets of peptides can be identified at a femtomole level. At the end of the process, batch processing of the MS/MS spectra produces peptide lists that identify purified proteins or protein mixtures with high confidence.