Every few years something remarkable happens and it changes things forever.
A few years ago, I wrote a post about the invention of the Orbitrap mass spectrometer by Alexander Makarov of HD Technologies in Manchester, UK. His first showing of that radical technology was at the American Society of Mass Spectrometry conference in Dallas in 1999. Hard to appreciate that that is now 24 years ago. The interest then was rapid and intense.
The new analyzer offered higher mass resolution than the established time of flight analyzers, and although it couldn’t quite match the heights achievable by a Fourier transform MS, it could get close and do so without the need for a large and expensive superconducting magnet and all the logistics and running costs that entails — including everyone speaking in a squeaky voice when the magnet quenches unexpectedly and fills the lab with helium.
Very soon after, HD was acquired by Thermo Fisher Scientific (then Thermo Electron) and we began commercializing the Orbitrap technology, releasing the first system, the LTQ Orbitrap in 2005. The system was an instant success, especially, but by no means exclusively, in the proteomics arena.
In the intervening decades, over 20 different models of Orbitrap instrument have been released for both LS-MS and GC-MS applications and it has proven itself to be a remarkable and flexible mass analyzer. The performance has climbed throughout; the first large, floor-standing systems could achieve a mass resolution (> 100,000), which was very impressive then, but nowadays, small, benchtop Orbitrap systems easily and routinely achieve 480,000 mass resolution and 1M resolution is an option on some Tribrid™ systems. To put that into context, I can still remember as a student setting an RF generator on fire trying to push it to give 1,000 resolution.
As I write this, the 71st ASMS has just finished, coincidentally also in Texas and also coincidentally (or perhaps not), again showcasing a remarkable new mass spectrometry technology – the novel Thermo Scientific Orbitrap Astral mass analyzer.
Combined synergistically with a high-resolution quadrupole mass filter and the Thermo Scientific Orbitrap mass analyzer, this revolutionary new instrument — the Thermo Scientific Orbitrap Astral mass spectrometer — holds the potential to again provide a paradigm shift in mass spectrometry by allowing up to four times faster throughput, up to two times deeper proteome coverage and higher sensitivity all with the expected accurate and precise quantitation, giving researchers the power to analyze over 1.4 million protein groups from 180 samples in a single day.
Thus, with the launch of the Orbitrap Astral, the game has changed. For the first time an instrument is available offering the combination of high throughput and high performance without compromise. Previously, there was always a trade-off between speed and other characteristics, to go faster something else had to give, but with the Orbitrap Astral, speed is available without sacrificing performance.
There is, seemingly, no end in sight to the ever-increasing technology growth in mass spectrometry. and the potential benefits to precision medicine, cancer research and scores of other fields is incalculable.
A few years ago, a couple of us calculated for a presentation at the 25th Montreux symposium how much faster mass spectrometers had gotten in those 25 years. We compared it with automobile development and came up with the surprising figure that, if the top speeds of cars had increased by the same factor, you’d now be able to buy a car capable of traveling at almost 75,000 km/s (0.25c) – or 47,000 ml/s. Not even on the autobahn!
Learn more at thermofisher.com/OrbitrapAstral.