The Rise of Mass Spectrometry and the Fall of Edman Degradation

[摘要] Featured Article: Shevchenko A, Wilm M, Vorm O, Mann M. Mass spectrometric sequencing of proteins from silver stained polyacrylamide gels. Anal Chem 1996;68:850–8.2Many of today's key proteins in biology and biomedicine were originally identified by protein chemical methods. Frederick Sanger obtained his first Nobel Prize for determining the sequence of insulin in the 1950s, and the Edman degradation, in which one amino acid after another is cleaved off the end of a protein or peptide and identified by HPLC, reigned supreme into the 1990s.My background is in mass spectrometry (MS),3 in particular electrospray ionization (1), for which my advisor John Fenn won a Nobel Prize. On coming to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg as a young group leader, I was determined to challenge what I saw as the old-fashioned chemical methods with high-tech and cool MS technology. Little did I know what I was up against, because this would require not only highly sensitive peptide sequencing by MS …

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