Apr 22 2021 Read 4 Times
A new mass spectrometric acquisition technology, Scanning SWATH, which measures the human proteome substantially faster and at a lower cost than its predecessors, has been developed by researchers at the Francis Crick Institute. The scientists, who have used the new approach to uncover key proteins in the body’s response to COVID-19, hope it will lead to more effective drug screening and biomarker discovery.
Measuring the activity of different proteins in our bodies requires analysis of cells, tissues or blood samples usually obtained with mass spectrometry; however, this process is usually time-intensive and expensive.
Scanning SWATH technology modifies electric fields inside mass spectrometer machines to generate more complex and more informative data. It relies on new computer algorithms that the team also developed, to translate this data and allow for thousands of samples to be processed in parallel.