Preface to the Second Volume

Little more than three years down the line and I am already writing the Preface to a second volume to follow Protein and Peptide Analysis by Mass. What has happened in between these times to make this second venture worthwhile?

New types of mass spectrometric instrumentation have appeared so that new techniques have become possible and existing techniques have become much more feasible. More particularly, however, the newer ionization techniques, introduced for the analysis of high molecular weight materials, have now been thoroughly used and studied. As a result, there has been an enormous improvement in the associated sample handling technology so that these methods are now routinely applied to much smaller sample amounts as well as to more intractable samples.

Again, this particular community of mass spectrometry users has both increased in number and diversified. And, riding this wave of acceptance, leaders in the field have set their sights on more complex problems: molecular interaction, ion structures, quantitation, and kinetics are just a few of the newer areas reported in Mass Spectrometry of Proteins and Peptides.

As with the first volume, one purpose of this collection, Mass Spectrometry of Proteins and Peptides, is to show the reader what can be done by the application of mass spectrometry, and perhaps even to encourage the reader to venture down new paths.