With this award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities: Departmental Multi-User Instrumentation program (CRIF:MU), Professors Christa L. Colyer and Rebecca W. Alexander will acquire a quadrupole time-of-flight (Q-TOF) mass spectrometer (MS). The instrument will be used to support research in the following areas: 1) affinity-based capillary electrophoresis studies to facilitate bioprobe design and microbe detection; 2) dissecting inter-domain communication in methionyl-tRNA synthetase; 3) excited state energy transfer amongst natural products; 4) structures and redox chemistry in sulfinic acid reduction; 5) modeling biological networks in arabidopsis through integration of genomic, proteomic, and metabolomic data; and, 6) cysteine sulfenic acids in catalysis and regulation.
Mass spectrometry (MS) is used to identify the chemical composition of a sample and determine its purity by measuring the mass of the molecular constituents in the sample after they are ionized and detected by the mass spectrometer. Mass spectrometry is one of the most widely used analytical tools by chemists and biochemists. The acquisition will provide training for undergraduate and graduate students in this technique using modern instrumentation through research programs in the department and in the undergraduate chemistry laboratories.
The goal of this project was to purchase a high-resolution mass spectrometer for small molecule studies, metabolomics, peptide sequencing, and analysis of post-translational modifications of proteins to be conducted by a diverse user group spanning multiple departments and campuses at Wake Forest University. Housed in the Chemistry Department, the new Thermo Scientific LTQ-Orbitrap XL mass spectrometer has been used for a wide variety of research and instructional purposes on a walk-up basis by trained faculty, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students. The intellectual merit of the project included (but was not limited to) the following: (i) studying the reactivity of dimedone and several dimedone-based derivatives with thiol-targeted electrophiles at physiological pH; (ii) the development of synthetic analogs of S-adenosyl-L-methionine to serve as biochemical tools in the study of the methylation of DNA and protein; (iii) the analysis of modified peptides to better understand the mechanisms of sulfur trafficking pathways of cysteine desulfurases from Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli; (iv) the investigation of the occurrence and synthesis of thio-modifications in B. subtilis tRNA; (v) the identification and determination of concentrations of flavonoid species in plant organs to better understand their effects on plant development; (vi) the determination of levels of sex steroid hormones in control of fat metabolism in plants; and (vii) the development of chemical trapping agents to identify products generated in cells when reactive oxygen and nitrogen species are present. The broader impacts of the project included (but were not limited to) the training of highly qualified personnel (especially groups typically underrepresented in the STEM fields), and on-demand access to high resolution mass spectrometry infrastructure at Wake Forest University.
