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Fortnightly digest · 2024-10-21 → 2024-11-03

charge states, and the panic that a third of a number causes

The instrument channel got properly technical for the first time. A member posted a spectrum, announced that their peptide had the wrong mass, and was walked through multiply-charged ions until the number made sense. The explanation that followed is one of the clearest things in the archive, and it exists because somebody was confidently wrong in public.

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What happened

  • A peak at roughly a third of the expected mass is usually a triply-charged ion rather than a degraded peptide, and the arithmetic takes ten seconds.
  • Retention time alone is not identity, because two different peptides can co-elute and a single number cannot distinguish them.
  • Deamidation at plus one dalton and oxidation at plus sixteen were introduced as the two shifts worth learning to recognise on sight.
  • HPLC_Hank posted an annotated spectrum and asked people to find the impurity themselves before he labelled it, which worked better than a lecture.
  • Somebody claimed a supplier had run mass spec without ever producing a spectrum, and the channel called that a claim rather than a result.

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