Coble,M.D.; Loreille,O.M.; Wadhams,M.J.; Edson,S.M.; Maynard,K.; Meyer,C.E.; Niederstätter,H.; Berger,C.; Berger,B.; Falsetti,A.B.; Gill,P.; Parson,W.; Finelli,L.N.; One of the greatest mysteries for most of the twentieth century was the fate of the Romanov family, the last Russian monarchy. Following the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, he and his wife, Alexandra, and their five children were eventually exiled to the city of Yekaterinburg. The family, along with four loyal members of their staff, was held captive by members of the Ural Soviet. [Read More]

Oberacher,H.; Pavlic,M.; Libiseller,K.; Schubert,B.; Sulyok,M.; Schuhmacher,R.; Csaszar,E.; Kofeler,H.C.; The inter-instrument and inter-laboratory transferability of a tandem mass spectral reference library originally built on a quadrupole-quadrupole-time-of-flight instrument was examined. The library consisted of 3759 MS/MS spectra collected from 402 reference compounds applying several different collision-energy values for fragmentation. In the course of the multicenter study, 22 test compounds were sent to three different laboratories, where 418 tandem mass spectra were acquired using four different instruments from two manufacturers. [Read More]

Oberacher,H.; Pavlic,M.; Libiseller,K.; Schubert,B.; Sulyok,M.; Schuhmacher,R.; Csaszar,E.; Kofeler,H.C.; A sophisticated matching algorithm developed for highly efficient identity search within tandem mass spectral libraries is presented. For the optimization of the search procedure a collection of 410 tandem mass spectra corresponding to 22 compounds was used. The spectra were acquired in three different laboratories on four different instruments. The following types of tandem mass spectrometric instruments were used: quadrupole-quadrupole-time-of-flight (QqTOF), quadrupole-quadrupole-linear ion trap (QqLIT), quadrupole-quadrupole-quadrupole (QqQ), and linear ion trap-Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometer (LIT-FTICR). [Read More]

Oberacher,H.; Pitterl,F.; The usability of a quadrupole-quadrupole-time-of-flight (QqTOF) instrument for the tandem mass spectrometric sequencing of oligodeoxynuleotides was investigated. The sample set consisted of 21 synthetic oligodeoxynucleotides ranging in length from 5 to 42 nucleotides. The sequences were randomly selected. For the majority of tested oligonucleotides, two or three different charge states were selected as precursor ions. Each precursor ion was fragmented applying several different collision voltages. Overall 282 fragment ion mass spectra were acquired. [Read More]

Turchi,C.; Buscemi,L.; Giacchino,E.; Onofri,V.; Fendt,L.; Parson,W.; Tagliabracci,A.; Current forensic mitochondrial (mt)DNA databases are limited in representative population data of African origin. We investigated HVS-I/HVS-II sequences of 120 Tunisian and Moroccan healthy male donors applying stringent quality criteria to assure high quality of the data and phylogenetic alignment and notation of the sequences. Among 64 Tunisians, 56 different haplotypes were observed and the most common haplotype (16187T 16189C 16223T 16264T 16270T 16278T 16293G 16311C 73G 152C 182T 185T 195C 247A 263G 309. [Read More]