I'll be honest, when I found this paper I was looking for the answer to a completely different mystery. However, this awesome paper goes a long way toward answering a question that's been rumbling around in my head for a while -- that is: how hard could you push an LTQ-Orbitrap system?
3 paragraphs dedacted due to excessive rambling....
What if you could get around that awesome mustard yellow interface and into the guts of the operating software. Could you write better, smarter instrument control software and crank that monster to 11?
Yeah -- this awesome study suggests there is definitely some room for improvement!
This team totally hacks and Orbitrap XL -- and drastically improves it's performance! 200ng of HeLa ran 8 times they get around 1,600 unique proteins (single shot top 10, 2 hour gradient). Honestly, that's pretty good and smokes any Q-TOF or Ion Trap I've ever personally used.
When they modify their instrument parameters to do cool things like better control dynamic exclusion -- and to automatically exclude peptides identified in the previous runs using their cool method (Smart MS2) they can get that number up to ~2,500 unique protein groups in 4 runs. Wow, right?
And if you're thinking "who cares, I'm no Russian hacker" check this out!
