Adisposablepoly(methylmethacrylate)-basedmicrofluidicmoduleforproteinidentificationbynanoelectrosprayionization-tandemmassspectrometry.docVIP

A disposable poly(methylmethacrylate)-based microfluidic module for protein identification by nano-electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry Shu-Hui Chen Wang-Chou Sung Gwo-Bin Lee Zhong-Yuan Lin Pang-Wei Chen Pao-Chi Liao Department of Chemistry, Department of Engineering Science, Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, College of Medicine, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, R.O.C. Abstract The design, fabrication, and its analytical utility of a poly(methylmethacrylate) (PMMA)-based microfluidic module for nano-electrospray tandem mass spectrometry (nano-ESI-MS/MS) were described. The microfluidic module can be mass-produced at low costs and used as a disposable device to generate nano-ESI-MS/MS signals for protein identification from low amount of protein samples. Compared with commercially available nanospray capillary tips, the module gave comparable signal quality and also offered advantages in convenience and easiness in operation, permitting repeated usages, and disposability. Keywords: poly(methylmethacrylate) (PMMA) / disposable microfluidic module / protein identification / proteomics / nano-electrospray ionization (nano-ESI) / tandem mass spectrometry 1 Introduction The advance of human genome project has shown many promises in biomedical research field. Within a few years, complete human genome sequence databases will be available to scientists for understanding disease mechanism, diagnosis, and new drug development [1]. While how the genomic sequence information will be exploited is still under intensive consideration, it is obvious now that, by using state-of-the-art mass spectrometry (MS) methods, proteins of interest to biomedical researchers can be mapped to sequence databases to find their identities [2]. This opens a possibility for systematic identification of the complete set of proteins that is expressed by the entire genome by a group of cells, that is, proteome. Proteome is a linguistic equivalent to the c