Mass spectrometry in the postgenomic era

Mass spectrometry (MS) is rapidly becoming an essential tool for biologists and biochemists in their efforts to throw light on molecular mechanisms within cellular systems. Used in unison with genome sequence data, MS has developed into the method of choice for identifying proteins, elucidating their posttranslational modifications, and reading out their functional interactions. Variations of the method have even begun to enable accurate mass determination of intact protein complexes, allowing for direct determination of subunit stoichiometry and the interactions between the subunits. Advances in mass spectrometric technologies have also led to great improvements in our ability to probe and define many of the other key molecular players in cells, including the all important lipid components. We provide here some perspectives on the explosion of applications of MS to protein science, systems biology, proteomics, lipidomics, and cell biology in general.