Oxidative attack to DNA is of particular interest since DNA modifications can lead to heritable mutations. The most studied product of DNA oxidation is 8-oxo-7,8-dihydro-2'-deoxyguanosine (8-oxodG). While 8-oxodG determination in blood and tissue cells is prone to artifacts, its measurement in urine employing liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) has gained more and more int...

15-series prostaglandins (PGE₂s) and isoprostanes (isoPGE₂s) are robust biomarkers of oxidative stress, possess potent biological activity, and may be derived through cyclooxygenase or free radical pathways. Thus, their quantification is critical in understanding many biological processes where PG, isoPG, or oxidative stress are involved. LC/MS/MS methods allow a highly selective, sensitive, si...

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease where T-cells activated against myelin antigens are involved in myelin destruction. Yet, healthy subjects also harbor T-cells responsive to myelin antigens, suggesting that MS patient-derived autoimmune T-cells might bear functional differences from T-cells derived from healthy individuals. We addressed this issue by analyzing gene expression pat...

When analyzing proteins in complex samples using tandem mass spectrometry of peptides generated by proteolysis, the inference of proteins can be ambiguous, even with well-validated peptides. Unresolved questions include whether to show all possible proteins vs a minimal list, what to do when proteins are inferred ambiguously, and how to quantify peptides that bridge multiple proteins, each with...

The simplest container of digital information is “the file” and among the vast array of files currently available, MS-Office files are probably the most widely used. The “Microsoft Compound Document File Format” (MCDFF) has often been used to host secret information. The new format created by Microsoft, first used with MS-Office 2007, makes use of a new standard, the ”Office Open XML Formats” (...

Living cells control and regulate their biological processes through the coordinated action of a large number of proteins that assemble themselves into an array of dynamic, multi-protein complexes(1). To gain a mechanistic understanding of the various cellular processes, it is crucial to determine the structure of such protein complexes, and reveal how their structural organization dictates the...

INTRODUCTION Diagnosis of the mucopolysaccharidoses (MPSs) generally relies on an initial analysis of total glycosaminoglycan (GAG) excretion in urine. Often the dimethylmethylene blue dye-binding (DMB) assay is used, although false-negative results have been reported. We report a multiplexed diagnostic test with a high sensitivity for all MPSs and with the potential to identify patients with I...

Gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy (GC-MS) is one of the so-called hyphenated analytical techniques. As the name implies, it is actually two techniques that are combined to form a single method of analyzing mixtures of chemicals. Gas chromatography separates the components of a mixture and mass spectroscopy characterizes each of the components individually. By combining the two techniques, an...

Metabolites are the final products of metabolism and are, therefore, directly related to phenotype. They constitute metabolome an organism. The wide diversity physicochemical properties metabolites in terms molecular weight, concentration, polarity, volatility, solubility, pKa, charge makes their analysis a remarkable challenge. With over 220,000 recorded HMDB database, there is no single analy...