Mass Spectrometry: Identification and Biodetection, Lessons Learned and Future Developments

Advances in Chemical and Biological Methods to Identify Microorganisms—From Past to Present

“…For a method to be considered successful nowadays, the attainment of results should take a maximum of 24 h, and in an emergency there is an urgent need for this time frame to be even smaller. Methods based on mass spectrometry (MS) have gained popularity as a microbial typing tool due to their speed, reduced costs, simplicity, and applicability for a wide range of microorganisms such as bacteria, archaea, and fungi [52,53]. With the advancements observed in MS methods, along with new data analysis, and processing and visualization tools, our understanding of biological systems has also increased, since we could analyze diverse sets of biomolecules, such as proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and amino acids [53,54,55,56,57].…”

“…With the advancements observed in MS methods, along with new data analysis, and processing and visualization tools, our understanding of biological systems has also increased, since we could analyze diverse sets of biomolecules, such as proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and amino acids [53,54,55,56,57]. Several ionization and separation techniques can be coupled with MS, such as gas chromatography (GC) [52,58,59,60,61], matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight mode (MALDI-TOF) [62,63,64,65,66,67,68], electromigration techniques [37,69], and electrospray ionization (ESI) [70,71].…”

Use of Virtual Impactor (VI) Technology in Biological Aerosol Detection

“…(www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/measure/ analy/direct/chem-bio.htm [accessed on 9 March 2011]). Fox (2005) provided a detailed account of the development of the US militar y CBMS system and commented on its susceptibility to false alarms. History has shown that mass spectrometry did not become commonly adopted for general applications in biological detection.…”