Ion Mobility at the East Midlands Proteomics Workshop 2012

Ion mobility separations made an appearance at the recent EMPW 2012 workshop, held last week at Loughborough University.

The meeting attracts proteomics researchers from far beyond the East Midlands, and there was an interesting range of talks and posters. Among the speakers was Dr Don Jones, who has established a biomarkers discovery facility at the University of Leicester. Dr Jones presented recent work looking at identifying molecular differences related to the effect of rice bran in the diet on the development of adenomas (which are used as a preclinical model of colorectal cancer). The team are using both metabonomic and proteomic approaches, and in some cases ion mobility measurements from the Waters Synapt are incorporated into the analyses. With the use of a combination of informatics packages, they were able to flag up candidate molecules that could potentially be used as markers of efficacy in fibre intervention trials.

Ion mobility is also being used in research presented by Professor Malcom Clench, of Sheffield Hallam University. He gave an overview of MALDI-IMS-MSI approaches to correlating treatment/exposure with biological response for a range of different drugs, showing how the ion mobility step helps improve the sensitivity and specificity of the imaging. Recent work discussed included a method combining solution-based proteomics with MALDI-MSI to follow protein induction in mouse fibrosarcoma models after treatment with tumour vascular disrupting agents.

Ion mobility has for several years been flagged as a potentially useful tool in conjunction with direct ionisation methods like MALDI and DESI, where backgrounds are typically complex, so it is encouraging to see it now delivering on this potential. The next question is whether FAIMS also has potential in this area, as a rapid pre-separation technique for direct analysis.

Take a look at our recent ultraFAIMS application note on the Isolation of peptide ions for sequence analysis using microchip FAIMS-in source CID-MS (FISCID-MS)

Ion mobility separations made an appearance at the recent EMPW 2012 workshop, held last week at Loughborough University.