The Emerging Potential of Advanced Targeted Mass Spectrometry to Become a Routine Tool for Protein Quantification in Biomedical Research

Abstract

Mass spectrometry-based proteomics has become an indispensable tool for system-wide protein quantification in systems biology, biomedical research, and increasing for clinical applications. In particular, targeted mass spectrometry offers the most sensitive and reproducible quantitative detection of proteins, peptides and post-translational modifications of any currently applied mass spectrometry technique and is therefore ideally suited to generate high quality quantitative datasets. Despite these apparent advantages, targeted mass spectrometry is only slowly gaining popularity in academia and pharmaceutical industries, mainly due to the additional efforts in assay generation and manual data validation. However, with the increasing accumulation of mass spectrometry data, advances in deep learning spectral prediction for automated assay development, these obstacles can and will be considerably reduced in the near future. Here, we describe the latest technological developments in this field and discuss the emerging importance of targeted mass spectrometry for systems biology research and potential key roles in bridging biomedical discovery and clinical implementation.