Professor Nick C. Polfer receives NSF CAREER Award.

Assistant Professor Nicolas Polfer is supported by the Analytical and Surface Chemistry Program in the Chemistry Division of NSF for the project entitled ‘Towards an understanding of the underlying chemistry in collision-induced dissociation of peptides in mass spectrometry’.

The fragmentation of peptides in mass spectrometers for the purpose of primary structure sequencing is the cornerstone technology in protein identification. Recently, however, it has been observed that under these high-energy conditions, some fragments can undergo re-arrangement processes, where the original sequence information is lost. This project aims to systematically investigate the chemical reactions that give rise to such processes, by directly probing the chemical structures with ion mobility, infrared photodissociation spectroscopy and computational approaches.