A scale for molecules that earned a Nobel Prize
Mass spectrometry “weighs” molecules with incredible precision. In 2002, the scientists who found how to do this with proteins won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
A mass spectrometer measures the mass-to-charge ratio of molecules. For a long time, the challenge was getting proteins — large, fragile molecules — into the instrument without destroying them.
John Fenn (with electrospray ionization) and Koichi Tanaka (with laser desorption) solved this problem and shared half of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The other half went to Kurt Wüthrich, for using nuclear magnetic resonance to study protein structure.
Thanks to these techniques, thousands of proteins can now be identified and measured in a single sample of brain tissue — everyday work at the LNP.
