Mass spectrometry

The publication of this special issue in which contributions are focused on mass spectrometry is linked to the annual conference of the German Mass Spectrometric Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Massenspektrometrie DGMS), which took part this year on March 5–8 at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany. The outstanding feature of this conference was the fact that not only organic and biochemical aspects of mass spectrometry (which have been the main focus in previous years), but also elemental trace and species analyses as well as isotopic investigations and measurements were presented. The 7th German Symposium on Mass Spectrometric Methods for Trace Element Analysis and the 20th ICP–MS Application Meeting were therefore incorporated into the conference program. The organizing committee under the chairmanship of Klaus G. Heumann was able to welcome about 500 participants, mainly from German-speaking countries, but also from further afield. The participants were instructed on new instrumental developments and applications by five plenary lectures, five keynote lectures and 50 oral contributions presented in two parallel sessions, as well as 200 poster presentations. In addition, four short courses prior to the conference provided introductions into the following topics: spatial resolution by direct SIMS and laser MS; fundamentals, applications and new developments in field desorption mass spectrometry; bioinformatics in proteomics, glycomics and metabolomics, and; fundamentals of fragmentation mechanisms of organic and bioorganic molecules. Also, 30 companies involved in the fabrication of mass spectrometers and associated with analytical equipment presented their newest instrumentation and developments.

Gary Hieftje from Indiana University (Bloomington, USA), was awarded the Wolfgang Paul Lecture of the DGMS. He reported on New Platforms for Elemental, Molecular and Biological Mass Spectrometry. This lecture, always presented at the beginning of the conference on Sunday evening, and followed by a reception sponsored by Bruker Daltonik, is dedicated to the memory of Wolfgang Paul, Professor of Physics at the University of Bonn in Germany until 1989, where he also received the Nobel Prize for Physics for his development of the “Paul ion trap”. Other plenary lectures were presented by Michael L. Gross of Washington University (St. Louis), on Research in Proteomics: Exploring Protein–Ligand Interactions and Searching for the Peptide Antigen that Causes Type I Diabetes, Norbert Jakubowski, Institute for Analytical Sciences Dortmund/Germany, on Plasma Mass Spectrometry—New Tools for Solid Sample Analyses; Elmar K. Jessberger, from the University of Münster in Germany, on Applications of Mass Spectrometry in Space; and Helmut Schwarz, from the Technical University Berlin, on Gas-Phase Catalysis by Atomic and Cluster Metal Ions: Challenges for and Opportunities in Contemporary Mass Spectrometry. The great diversity of the titles of these plenary lectures excellently reflects the range of topics presented at the conference and clearly demonstrates the broad range of scientific investigations in which mass spectrometry currently plays a role. In addition, another reason to combine structural and elemental mass spectrometry into one conference is the fact that elemental mass spectrometry, especially ICP–MS, is increasingly being used for bioanalytical investigations of heteroatoms in biomolecules, and it provides for a relatively easy quantification of such substances by measuring, for example, phosphorus in DNA fragments or metals in metallothioneins. As a consequence, one session was focused on the combined use of structural and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry in proteomics. Also, environmental investigations often need quantitative elemental as well as structural information. Special attention was therefore given to atmospheric chemistry, which is an important scientific research area in the analytical groups of the Analytical Chemistry and Physics Departments of the University of Mainz as well as in the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry in Mainz. The mass spectrometric characterisation of aerosol particles was therefore a special topic in one of the environmental sessions. Furthermore, elemental speciation by hyphenated techniques, e.g. HPLC, GC or CE coupling with ICP–MS, was another important topic in environmentally focused contributions. Many contributions on this topic came from participants from the University of Mainz, because a project of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) on Trace Analysis of Elemental Species: Development of Methods and Applications, involving about ten research groups from different departments, has been established at the university for approximately four years. Special interest was also shown in a new concept for a mass spectrometer, the LTQ Orbitrap constructed by Thermo Electron, which in the future may be able to fill a gap in terms of performance and cost between TOF and FT–ICR instruments. Furthermore, methodical developments for preparation-free surface analyses such as direct analysis in real time (DART) from Jeol and desorption electrospray ionisation (DESI), which was first developed by the group of R.G. Cooks, were awarded particular recognition.

Several awards were presented, followed by corresponding oral contributions from winners. The Life Science Prize, sponsored by Applied Biosystems, was awarded to Bernhard Spengler, Professor at the Institute of Inorganic and Analytical Chemistry of Giessen in Germany. The Mattauch Herzog Prize for outstanding work in mass spectrometry by a young scientist, sponsored by Thermo Electron, was awarded to Christoph A. Schalley, Professor at the Institute of Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Free University of Berlin. Two Wolfgang Paul Awards for excellent PhD dissertations and one for a Diploma dissertation, sponsored by Bruker Daltonik, went to Jessica Loos from the Technical University of Berlin, to Katharina Koch from the University of Karlsruhe and to Sebastian George of the University of Münster, respectively.

This issue of Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry contains several contributions presented at the DGMS conference at the Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz, as well as a number of additional manuscripts in which mass spectrometry is used as an analytical tool for different applications. These papers were submitted to the journal at the same time as the DGMS contributions and, by including them, a more complete picture of new developments and the different fields where mass spectrometry plays an essential role in analytical science can be presented in this issue.

Plenary lecturers Norbert Jakubowski, Helmut Schwarz, Elmar Jessberger (from left to right, upper row) and Michael Gross, Gary Hieftje (center bottom, center right); Jochen Franzen and Hans-Friedrich Grützmacher (center left) who both became honorary members of the DGMS; Klaus G. Heumann and Norbert Trautmann (bottom left), two members of the organizing committee relaxing at the end of the third conference day; the six winners of poster prizes (bottom right): three poster prizes were sponsored by ABC.