Many kinds of venomous principles modulate physiological responses of mammalian signal transduction systems, on which they act selectively as enhancers, inhibitors or some other kind of effectors. These toxins become useful tools for physiological research. We have employed and characterized paralyzing toxins from the venom of spiders, insects and scorpions with a limited supply. We have develo...

Profiling of leaf extracts from mutants of Arabidopsis with defects in lipid desaturation demonstrates the utility of collision-induced dissociation time-of-flight mass spectrometry (CID-TOF MS) for screening biological samples for fatty acid compositional alterations. CID-TOF MS uses the collision cell of a quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometer to simultaneously fragment all of the ions ...

Phosphopeptides with one and four phosphate groups were characterized by MALDI mass spectrometry. The molecular ion of monophosphopeptide could be detected both as positive and negative ions by MALDI TOF with delayed extraction (DE) and in the reflector mode. The tetraphospho peptide could be detected in linear mode. When MS/MS spectra of the monophospho peptides were obtained in a MALDI TOF TO...

Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (TOF-MS) is now widely used to detect pathogens in clinical settings in Japan. Here, we report the ability of TOF-MS to detect bacteria from blood culture (BC) broths, and compare the efficacy of TOF-MS to that of conventional culture methods. Bacteria were correctly detected from 63 monomicrobial samples within 80 min...

BACKGROUND Due to considerable differences in pathogenicity, Haemophilus influenzae, H. parainfluenzae and H. haemolyticus have to be reliably discriminated in routine diagnostics. Retrospective analyses suggest frequent misidentifications of commensal H. haemolyticus as H. influenzae. In a multi-center approach, we assessed the suitability of fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) and matri...

The present study is commentary and aims to evaluate the practical application of Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) and Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption/Ionization Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) in clinical microbiology. The MALDI-TOF MS method has been replaced cultural and biochemical tests for species identification in most laboratories worldwide. Moreover, WGS has elevated the ...