The new Scanning SWATH technology renders mass spectrometry significantly more time- and cost-effective than beforePhoto: Arne Sattler/Charité It is faster and cheaper than a conventional blood count. To demonstrate the technique’s potential, the researchers used blood plasma collected from Covid-19 patients. Using the new technology, they identified eleven previously unknown proteins which are markers of disease severity. The work has been published in Nature Biotechnology. Thousands of proteins are active inside the human body at any given time, providing its structure and enabling reactions which are essential to life. The body raises and lowers the activity levels of specific proteins as required, including when responding to external factors such as pathogens and drugs. The detailed patterns of the proteins found inside cells, tissues and blood samples can therefore help researchers to better understand diseases or make diagnoses and prognoses. In order to obtain this ‘protein fingerprint’, researchers use mass spectrometry, a technology known to be both time-consuming and cost-intensive. ‘Scanning SWATH’, a new mass-spectrometry-based technology, promises to change this. Developed under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Markus Ralser, Director of Charité’s Institute of Biochemistry, this technology, which is much faster and cost-effective than previous methods, enables researchers to measure several hundred samples per day. “In order to speed up this technology, we changed the mass spectrometer’s electric fields. The data produced are of such extreme complexity that humans can no longer analyze them,” explains Einstein Professor Prof. Ralser, who is also a Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London. He adds: “We therefore developed computer algorithms that are based on neural networks and which use these data to extract the relevant biological information. This enables us to identify thousands of proteins in parallel and greatly reduces measuring timescales. Fortunately, this method is also more precise.”