The future of biological mass spectrometry.

Biological applications of mass spectrometry have grown exponentially since the discovery of MALDI and electrospray ionization techniques. This growth has been further fueled by the massive volume of DNA sequence information that is now available. An ambitious goal of some of this research is to monitor the level and modification of all proteins and metabolites in a biological sample such as plasma. A major research effort in mass spectrometry and related disciplines has been expended over the past several years toward reaching this and other less ambitious goals, and considerable progress has been made; but the presently available tools are clearly not sufficient for these very difficult tasks. In this "critical insight" discussion we suggest that recent advances in time-of-flight (TOF) technology with MALDI ionization may provide some important new tools for achieving the goals of biological research.