The last few years have been a lot of fun for mass spectrometrists because, all of a sudden, proteomics isn’t a one player field. Shocking advances from Bruker, that most of us didn’t even know were in business and the out-of-the-blue drop of the SCIEX trapping ZenoTOF have made every proteomics purchase something you actually have to think about.
Is this the year that Waters joins the party? It might be.
Those 3 little letters signal something really exciting. Last year Waters dropped the DESI powered W-TOF for mass spec imaging at up to 240,000 mass resolution. Not the fastest thing ever, but still enough that a lab 2 miles from me in Baltimore got one and already had data to present this Sunday.
I haven’t seen a ton of data yet, and it has largely been from their Australian marketing people. What I did see, however, was resolved fine isotope structure — on a TOF. And mapping of a tryptic digest of the NIST mAB standard using 1ppm mass tolerance windows.
Resolution on the W-TOF is gained by performing additional passes, so it goes faster at lower resolution. I don’t have time for specs, but it might be worth taking a look at. They also launched a MALDI for this.
AND — a G3 system. We had a G2 system in my lab in 2011, and while they’ve tweaked the Q-TOF over the yeras it has always been a G2. What’a a G3?
It looks like a Tweaked G2 with a new IMS system and a really interesting charge state controller for automatic adjustment of the sensitivity (through scan averaging? that’s what I’d guess, but I’m not sure.)
I gotta run, but details of other cool hardware drops are in my “to read” folder.
Last thought, though, and really the inspiration behind this post this morning: If it’s time for you to upgrade your instrumentation, and you really have to evaluate hardware from 4 different vendors — like, for real, look at specs, because they can all do what you want — when does this competition lead to competitions for pricing for us?
It doesn’t seem to have happened yet, but it has to, right?
