The Department of Agricultural Chemistry and the Environmental Health Sciences Center at Oregon State University request funds from the National Science Foundation to purchase an electrospray tandem quadrupole mass spectrometer. Research projects which will depend on this equipment are in the areas of biochemistry and biotechnology. More specifically the instrument will be used in the research goals of ten projects described in this application to: (a) provide molecular weights of proteins, (b) sequence N-terminally blocked or modified proteins, (c) determine the sites and structures of carbohydrates on glycoproteins, (d) determine the sites of alkylation reactions on protein, (e) locate the receptor sites in the enzyme of a substrate-enzyme complex (f) determine the sites of linkage of protein-DNA covalent units (g) determine the disulfide linkages of several proteins, and (h) determine the structures of elecitors in aphid resistant hop plants. These projects cannot be efficiently or even successfully completed without the instrument for which funds are being requested. The present mass spectrometers available for these projects, which includes a Krotos MS 50TC-RF instrument, lack the sensitivity, mass range and tandem mass spectrometry capability to do the necessary sequencing and structure analyses. The increasing emphasis of biochemical and biotechnology research and the recent addition of new faculty in these areas on the Oregon State University campus, has created a growing need for this equipment.
