High-throughput proteomics has typically relied on protein identification based on MALDI-MS peptide maps of proteolytic digests of 2D-gel-separated proteins. This technique, however, requires significant sequence coverage in order to achieve a high level of confidence in the identification. Tandem MS data have the advantage of requiring fewer peptides (2) for high confidence identification, assuming adequate MS/MS sequence coverage. MALDI-MS/MS techniques are becoming available, but can still be problematic because of the difficulty of inducing fragment ions of a singly charged parent ion. Electrospray ionization, however, has the advantage of generating multiply charged species that are more readily fragmented during MS/MS analysis. Two electrospray/tandem mass spectrometry-based approaches, nanovial-ESI-MS/MS and LC-MS/MS, are used for high throughput proteomics, but much less often than MALDI-MS and peptide mass fingerprinting. Nanovial introduction entails extensive manual manipulation and often shows significant chemical background from the in-gel digest. LC-MS has the advantages that the chemical background can be removed prior to analysis and the analytes are concentrated during the separation, resulting in more abundant analyte signals. On the other hand, LC-MS can often be time intensive. Here, we report the incorporation of on-line sample clean-up and analyte concentration with a high-throughput, chip-based, robotic nano-ESI-MS platform for proteomics studies. is well suited for protein identification from gel band digests because of the relative ease and availability of modern ESI-MS/MS techniques. Detection of far fewer peptides is necessary for unambiguous identification when tandem MS methods are incorporated than when only MS techniques are employed [7]. ESI-MS/MS has an advantage over matrix assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI)-MS/MS [8] in that multiply charged species, which are more readily fragmented in tandem MS applications than singly charged species at equivalent collision energies, are formed during the electrospray process. Moreover, many labs are already equipped with mass spectrometers that are capable of ESI-MS/MS whereas MALDI instruments with tandem mass analyzers have become commercially available only in the last few years. Drawbacks of using ESI-MS or ESI-MS/MS as the final analytical step for protein identification, however, are the high chemical background and low sample abundance of proteolytic digests of gel bands. These problems can be overcome with on-line liquid chromatography (LC) or sample clean-up and concentration prior to ESI-MS, but neither of these techniques is conducive to high-throughput applications.In an effort to achieve high-throughput clean-up for ESI-MS and ESI-MS/MS analysis of peptides from gel band tryptic digests, we have adapted several approaches for concentrating and desalting these tryptic peptides for implementation with a robotic nanospray system, the Advion Biosciences Nanomate 100 [9 -11].