Ruedi Aebersold

Meet Ruedi Aebersold

Instrument you couldn’t live without? An ESI tandem mass spectrometer. Essentially all our work depended on these types of instruments. Without these, proteomics as we know it would not be possible.The progress in the performance of the instruments over the last couple of decades has been incredible. Today, even the protein contents of single cells can be analyzed – to some extent. Some speculate that other powerful approaches will displace MS as the key technology in proteomics, but I can’t see that happening anytime soon. For sure, some aspects of proteomics will be taken over by faster, simpler or cheaper techniques, which are now emerging. But the incredible flexibility of MS to not only identify protein species, but to also determine their functional state, their interactions with other proteins or nuclei acids, or to identify the site and type of PTM’s will remain key tasks for MS.