From large analogical instruments to small digital black boxes: 40 years of progress in mass spectrometry and its...

As the title implies, the author undertakes a personal retrospective on the developments that since 1965 have shaped MS and taken it from a position of simply playing a role in protein chemistry to becoming an indispensable tool in proteomics, all in the past 40-year span. The article reviews the MS timeline of events, stopping at various time points where MS made significant contributions to protein chemistry or where the development of new instrumentation for MS represented a major advance for peptide and protein work. Major highlights in the field and their significance for peptide and protein characterization are covered, starting from the pioneering work carried out in the 1960s on peptide derivative formation and sequencing with instrumentation proper of that time, to later work done with triple, quad, and four-sector instruments, and on to the more recent work on the characterization of the proteome with ion traps, time-of-flight (TOF) instruments, and new ionization and tagging techniques.