Thermo Fisher Scientific’s New ETD Mass Spectrometry Technology Wins Silver Award at PITTCON 2007

SAN JOSE, CA (March 8, 2007) – Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. received the Silver Editors’ Award at PITTCON 2007, the largest North American conference and exposition on laboratory science and instrumentation. PITTCON editors voted the new Thermo Scientific LTQ XL linear ion trap mass spectrometer featuring Electron Transfer Dissociation (ETD) technology, one of the best new product innovations of the event, which featured more than 1000 exhibitors.

Available for the first time on a linear ion trap mass spectrometer, ETD provides important new peptide structural information not available from conventional collisionally induced dissociation (CID) methods. ETD is a new fragmentation technique that significantly improves protein characterization, post-translational modification (PTM) analysis and top-down or middle-down sequencing of proteins and peptides. The new Thermo Scientific LTQ XL is the only mass spectrometer that offers multiple dissociation techniques, Pulsed Q Dissociation (PQD), ETD and CID.

“We believe ETD performed on a linear ion trap is a major turning point for the proteomics community, enabling researchers to pinpoint, identify and fully characterize more post-transitional modificatons such as phosphorylation and glycosylation than ever before,” said Greg Herrema, president of Scientific Instruments at Thermo Fisher Scientific. Recognition for ETD at PITTCON 2007 follows last year’s PITTCON Gold Editors’ Award for the Thermo Scientific LTQ Orbitrap hybrid mass spectrometer.

Taking advantage of the high ion storage capacity and fast cycle times of linear ion trap technology, the LTQ XL with ETD is, according to the company,  the only integrated mass spectrometry solution allowing researchers to conduct rapid, alternating CID and ETD experiments during LC/MSn analysis of complex samples. ETD data is easily processed using a new version of BioWorks software – both CID and ETD spectra are searched independently, with results from both searches combined for easy sorting and comparison. This new system provides the most complete view of a proteome currently available.