The Orbitrap Fusion™ and Quantiva mass spectrometers are among the newest equipment purchased with support from Pelotonia funds. The funds were contributed by the OSUCCC – James to an Ohio State and state of Ohio investment in a major upgrade and expansion of OSU’s mass spectrometry and proteomics capabilities.
Mass-spectrometers are used in cancer research to better understand cancer-cell biology. The instruments are needed, for example, to identify the quantity and characteristics of proteins in tumor and normal tissues. The new mass spectrometers were purchased for the Proteomics Shared Resource (SR), which provides this critical technology and expertise for OSUCCC – James researchers and the cancer-research community across Ohio.
The Proteomics SR is part of the Campus Chemical Instrument Center that is managed by Ohio State’s Office of Research and the OSUCCC – James.
Proteomics SR Director Michael Freitas, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Virology, Immunology and Medical Genetics at Ohio State and a member of the Molecular Biology and Cancer Genetics Program at the OSUCCC – James, says the sophisticated new mass spectrometers will enable researchers to identify compounds faster, more accurately and more thoroughly.
Vicki Wysocki, PhD, an Ohio Eminent Scholar in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences, and senior faculty adviser to the Proteomics SR, says the ongoing mass spectrometry upgrade/expansion has involved the purchase of several state-of-the-art instruments for measurements, and they include sample robots for high-throughput applications.
These new instruments are housed in the Campus Chemical Instrument Center, which was founded in 1981 as a unit of the OSU Office of Research to provide research facilities for the entire campus in three areas: NMR spectrometry, mass spectrometry and proteomics, and macromolecular X-ray crystallography.
“The Center is an interdisciplinary unit serving faculty from the colleges of Arts and Sciences; Education and Human Ecology; Engineering; Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences; Medicine; Optometry; Pharmacy; Veterinary Medicine; and Ohio State’s Comprehensive Cancer Center, to name a few,” Wysocki says.
She notes that the Center also is a hub for the Ohio Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and Ohio Mass Spectrometry MR consortiums, providing researchers in colleges and universities throughout Ohio with access to the Center’s facilities with on-campus user fees.