Renato Zenobi; Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, ETH Zürich, Switzerland

Soft Ionization Mass Spectrometry for Studying Noncovalent Interactions

Under appropriate conditions, electrospray ionization (ESI) and matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI), the two preeminent soft ionization methods used in modern mass spectrometry (MS), are capable of ionizing and putting noncovalently bound complexes into the gas phase intact. This opens up many possibilities to study protein-ligand interactions, protein-protein interactions, and DNA multimers.  In this talk, I will give an update on modern MS-related technologies that we apply in our laboratory with a focus on obtaining quantitative thermodynamic parameters: native ESI-MS titration, high mass MALDI-MS, high-resolution ion mobility spectroscopy coupled with MS, and temperature-controlled and T-jump native ESI.  I will give examples how these technologies are deployed, in particular to characterize large noncovalent complexes and biomolecule-small molecule interactions.