Barbara Larsen

Meet Barbara Larsen

Passion: My passion centers on “fitness for purpose”: ensuring that the very best separation techniques matched with mass spectrometers with appropriate resolution, mass accuracy and sensitivity are applied to support research and plant problems providing critical solutions to the questions posed. It is critical to provide accurate and precise data, whether you are elucidating a structure or quantitating an active in a product. Most importantly, the data needs to stand the test of time. The analytical data produced will be used as a part of patent application, filing with a regulatory agency or determine the future of a corporate research platform. The field of mass spectrometry continues to change, making it possible to make measurements that were once unthinkable!

Pivotal moment: The pivotal moment was when I was interfacing electrospray ionization to a magnetic sector instrument I was using before these sources were commercially available. Using the resolution of this system, I identified the charge state of in-source fragment ions making it possible to sequence entire peptides. I knew then that electrospray was going to be a technology that would be a game changer for the field of protein identification. The advancements in ionization techniques have made LC-MS available in every analytical laboratory. Exploring alternate ionization techniques and instrumentation continues to be a focus of mine.

Prediction: With the advances in instrumentation and novel ionization techniques, I predict mass spectrometers will be placed in users’ hands to extract, mass measure, and sequence proteins directly from gels. Furthermore, with the research in biomarker identification, I foresee where physicians will be able to have instrumentation in their offices to provide real time analysis for patients to make accurate diagnosis, providing individualized care.