MRI: Track 1: Acquisition of a MALDI-TOF-TOF Mass Spectrometer with TOF/TOF Capabilities

This award is jointly funded by the Major Research Instrumentation Program, the Chemistry Research Instrumentation Program, the Macromolecular, Supramolecular, and Nanochemistry (MSN) program in Chemistry, and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This award will support several universities within the New Orleans area, including Tulane, Dillard, and Loyola. The acquisition of a matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometer (MALDI-ToF MS) will be used by researchers in the departments of chemistry, chemical engineering, and physics. MALDI-ToF MS is one of the main tools for the characterization of large molecules (having a molecular weight of greater than 500) including peptides, proteins, nucleic acids, carbohydrates, and polymers. The new instrument will have high resolution and tandem MS capabilities. This instrument will strengthen the mass spectrometry community within New Orleans and ensure that undergraduate and graduate students at the participating institutions will have access to state-of-the-art mass spectrometry instrumentation. In addition, high school students, 80% of whom are African American, will learn about polymers and how MALDI-ToF MS can determine molecular weights and repeating units. The acquisition of a MALDI-ToF MS will enhance existing MS capabilities and enable new research not currently possible at Tulane, Dillard and Loyola. These new capabilities will elucidate the interaction of structure and molecular weight for a variety of large molecules. For example, the degradation of hexadecapeptide found in Alzheimer’s patients can be investigated by the arrangement of the labile amino acids. Topological transitions of DNA will also be investigated using gyrase variants in bacteria. A number of these gyrase variants have higher (proline) or lower (glycine) flexibility, and it will be useful to determine the high molecular weight degradation products of these compounds. The polymer structure of bis(hydroxymethyl)propanoic acid (purely linear, purely dendritic, or randomly hyperbranched) will also be investigated. The new instrumentation will also be used to characterize the end groups of poly(ethylene glycol) polymers. There will be many mass spectrometry analyses that the new instrumentation can do quite easily, including DNA, cavitands, inorganic complexes, etc. that will be hard or impossible without this instrument. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.