What is Mass Spectrometry?
Mass spectrometry is a method for accurately measuring the mass of molecules, and when used with proper controls can also be employed to measure the amount of a compound.
What is Proteomics?
The study of proteins, driven by the understanding that they are the principal elements that carry out biological function, has been a fundamental part of modern biochemistry for over a century.
The Fifteenth International Symposium on Proteomics in the Life Sciences will be held August 17-21, 2025 in Cambridge, MA. More information can be found here.
UCSF Mass Spectrometry Facility
The Biomedical Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics Resource Center, is supported by the Adelson Medical Research Foundation, UCSF-, HHMI- and NIH-funded instrumentation and biological research project grants. This Resource Center provides leadership, expertise and advice about proteomic methodologies to investigators and their groups on the design and implementation of suitable experimental strategies that will enable them to achieve their research goals. The Resource staff then carries out the experiments and the processing of the data sets obtained, and works with the students, postdocs and faculty on interpretation of the results.
The Center’s faculty and staff conduct collaborative research focused on a wide variety of challenging problems involving the human and related proteomes and their dynamics. Active project areas include neurobiology, cell biology, biomedical projects, cancer signaling and in plant proteomics. The Center is a world leader in facilitating proteomic analyses per se as well as in the development of better methodologies to enable studies of new problem areas in parallel.
One major research area focuses on the global analysis of post-translational modifications in many cell and tissue systems, including phosphorylation, O-GlcNAcylation, ubiquitinylation, etc. and development of mass spectrometric methods for quantitative comparative analysis of protein and post-translational modification levels and dynamics, e.g. applying PRM and neucode MS. Another major area involves the characterization of protein-protein interactions and protein complexes using affinity and proximity proteomics strategies. Finally studies of the architecture of very large protein machines are on-going using high sensitivity chemical cross-linking, peptide sequencing mass spectrometry and cryoEM studies.
Center instrumentation includes several Orbitrap-based mass spectrometry platforms including an Orbitrap-Velos, Orbitrap-Elite, Q-Exactive Plus, Fusion-Lumos and an ion-mobility enabled Exploris 480 system and associated capillary liquid chromatography systems.
The Center also continues to develop and support one of the leading suites of tools for analysis of large mass spectrometry-derived proteomics data, Protein Prospector. Current web-based releases allow unrestricted searching of MS and MSMS data, by the research community, as well as the ability to perform comparative quantitative analysis of samples using isotopic-labeling reagents. MS-Viewer allows viewing of annotated spectra from a wide range of search engine output formats and is heavily used to support journal publications. Protein Prospector is the only freely-available web-based resource that allows these types of comprehensive analyses.
