Most mass spectrometry instruments analyze ions one or a few species at a time. Now, researchers at Rockefeller University have built a prototype that takes a very different approach, handling more than a billion ions simultaneously and laying the groundwork for a new generation of massively parallel instruments.
The system – called MultiQ-IT – was inspired by the way molecules move through nuclear pore complexes. Instead of forcing ions through a single analytical path, the cube-shaped trap uses hundreds of electrically controlled openings to cool, confine, sort, and redirect many ion populations at once. At peak performance, a 486-port version could hold up to ten billion charges – around 1,000 times the capacity of conventional ion traps – and improved signal-to-noise by as much as 100-fold by allowing abundant singly charged background ions to leak away while retaining rarer, biologically informative multiply charged species.
“What revolutionized DNA sequencing wasn’t any change in the underlying chemistry,” said co-author Brian T. Chait in a press release. “It was the ability to run so many chemical reactions in parallel.” He adds, “That’s what we’re trying to do with mass spectrometry.”
The advance could be especially important for single-cell proteomics, where rare molecules are easily missed. “The least abundant things can be more important than the more abundant things,” says Andrew Krutchinsky. For now, MultiQ-IT is a prototype rather than a finished instrument – but it offers a convincing blueprint for how mass spectrometry might finally scale up.
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