This Week's Mass Spec News

Essential Reading

Negative Aura
 

Many migraine patients experience auras – a combination of visual and sensory disturbances, proceeding the one-sided headache attacks. But why is this happening? A new study revealed that cerebrospinal fluid carries proteins to pain-signaling sensory nerves, where they bind – activating the neurons and triggering the migraine. The researchers employed mass spectrometry and analyzed the proteins released during migraine attacks. They successfully identified 12 that can activate the underlying pathway, including the calcitonin gene–related peptide (CGRP) – which is already used to develop migraine treatments. 

“We hope the proteins we identified – aside from CGRP – may be used in the design of new preventive treatments for patients that don’t respond to available CGRP antagonists. The next step for us is to identify the protein with the greatest potential,” said main author Martin Kaag Rasmussen in a press release. 

Worth Your Time...

Transformation products are more toxic than their parent PFAS, finds study on wastewater treatment systems with high-resolution mass spectrometry. Link 

Researchers identify the “network” behind Epimedieum-induced hepatotoxicity – with LC-MS-based metabolomics – revealing icaritin as a key driver of this toxicity. Link 

Review: newer UV-LIF instruments can distinguish between bioaerosol types; SERS and CARS are also rapid and specific technologies to discriminate bacterial spores; BAMS and MALDI-TOF MS have higher accuracy and sensitivity for bioaerosol, respectively. Link

Electrospray ionization-MS enhanced with a gel loaded tip enables analysis of viscous food samples – that was not possible with conventional ESI. Link  

Scientists investigate the proteomic and peptidomic profiles of viper venoms with MS – successfully describing six venomic profiles for the first time. Link

Community Corner

Metabolomics Episode II – The Return of MASST
 

The Mass Spectrometry Search Tool (MASST) is back – and better than ever…  

The web-enabled mass spectrometry search engine was firstly introduced by the Dorrestein lab in 2020 – enabling its users to search a specific molecular “fingerprint” against spectral data that have been deposited in one of the largest public repositories for mass spectrometry data in the world, GNPS/MassIVE. 

However, limitations – particularly in untargeted metabolomics for microbial analysis – remain; “A single search with the original MASST would take around 20 minutes, making it impossible to programmatically search for hundreds or thousands of MS/MS spectra, and the obtained output was not easily interpretable because it was not associated with metadata. So, we developed microbeMASST – an evolved and domain specific version of MASST,” says Simone Zuffa, microbeMASST creator and postdoc scholar at Skaggs. 

You can read the full interview here.