Peptide and Protein Laboratory for Mass Analysis and Purification (Trieste)

Mass Spectrometry Instrumentation

The laboratory is equipped with a BioAccord LC‑MS system. The platform includes a UV‑PDA detector, a fluorescence detector, and a TOF mass spectrometer with an ESI ionization source.

The system is designed for the monitoring and identification of biopharmaceutical products across product development, manufacturing, and quality control phases. Its user‑friendly configuration also allows researchers with limited mass spectrometry experience to operate the instrument effectively, while still delivering high performance.

Specifically, the system enables:

• acquisition of high‑quality data suitable for biomolecule design and characterization;
• analysis of complex biomolecules with greater selectivity, specificity, and dynamic range compared to chromatographic and electrophoretic methods based solely on optical detection;
• generation of data that can be used to design purification strategies relying only on optical properties.

The instrument effectively analyzes both peptides and proteins, covering a mass range from 200 to 100,000 m/z, with extremely low sample consumption—on the order of nanograms.

Preparative HPLC Instrumentation

The laboratory presents a Waters LC Prep 150 system equipped with:

• a UV‑PDA detector,
• an automated fraction collector with multiple configurations for collecting either small or large volumes,
• an automatic injector.

This system is designed to deliver robust, targeted, and reproducible purification. The selected configuration supports a wide variety of application requirements, from processing a limited number of samples per day to handling high‑throughput workloads, enabling intensive purification periods even in the absence of on‑site personnel, because of a full automated configuration.