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The Mini S analyser may look like something out of Ghostbusters but it is designed for use in hazardous locations © ACSThe latest gadget to come out of the labs of Purdue University in the US may look like the fictional ‘proton pack’ from Ghostbusters, but it’s actually a portable mass spectrometer that can be carried around on the user’s back. While it can’t capture an unruly poltergeist, the team who developed it say it could be a useful tool for environmental and forensic monitoring, and have shown it can identify chemical weapons, drugs and explosives.Most mass spectrometry happens in...

It's not quite the ‘elephant in the room’, but an 18 megadalton viral assembly is perhaps the biggest thing in the mass spectrometer (MS). Dutch and US researchers have used quadrupole time-of-flight (QToF) native MS to investigate intact capsids from a bacteriophage – a virus that infects bacteria. While there is theoretically no upper limit on the mass of a particle that might be analysed using ToF MS, the work is far from trivial in breaking through the record.The late John Fenn shared the 2002 Nobel prize in chemistry for his pioneering work on electrospray ionisation techniques in mass...

A simple and fast technique to examine the surface of banknotes and identify counterfeits has been developed by scientists in Brazil and the US.The counterfeiting of banknotes is a global problem that is increasing in scale and sophistication. Counterfeiters now use computerised reproduction methods like scanners and laser printers to copy real notes, and gone are the days when a fake could be spotted by simply testing the look and feel of the paper.The new technologies used by counterfeiters have thrown out a challenge to law enforcement. 'Forensic laboratories are therefore confronted with an increasing demand to analyse larger numbers...

Researchers have successfully identified over 5,000 proteins that are present in embryonic stem cells, tripling the size of previous results and in the process creating the largest quantified protein map to date. Stem cells hold great potential in biology and medicine, but a host of questions lingers about how they operate and convert into other cells. To help answer these questions, researchers have begun taking a 'big picture' approach, identifying all the proteins that are expressed in stem cells. Currently, around 1700 proteins have been identified in stem cells. Now, using mass spectrometry and special "heavy" amino acids (made with...

Mini-explosions under a cell sample could help to identify disease. Mass spectrometry on single cells could tell if they are cancerous or diseased.SCIENCE SOURCE/SPLAn explosive chemical technique can now be used to identify individual molecules in biological samples, down to the single-cell level. Researchers hope the procedure could be used in clinics a few years from now to screen blood or urine for metabolites — the final products of biological processes — that can be used to diagnose disease. "The vast majority of small molecules in humans are unknown," says Gary Siuzdak at the Scripps Center for Mass Spectrometry, La...