First-year PhD student Amber Rolland recently finished her rotations and has chosen the Prell Group as her research home. Welcome, Amber!

The Prell Group welcomes Isabella Young, who is conducting research in our group this summer via the University of Oregon Summer Program for Undergraduate Research (SPUR). She is studying anthrax toxin complex and its interactions with lipids.

The Prell Group will present research at the upcoming American Chemical Society NORM Meeting in Corvallis, OR. Micah will give a talk on the mechanism of chemical supercharging in electrospray ionization, and Simon will present a poster on Collidoscope, our program for computing collisional cross sections of large proteins and complexes using the Trajectory Method.

The Prell Group presented some of our latest research at the American Society for Mass Spectrometry Annual Conference in Indianapolis, IN, this June. Micah showed off his work on the mechanism of chemical supercharging in electrospray ionization, and Sean and Jim presented posters exploring the use of Fourier transform to analyze extremely congested mass spectra of polymers and lipoprotein Nanodiscs. The conference was a lot of fun!

Many thanks to our beta-testers for Collidoscope! Collisional cross section computations can now be done in Collidoscope with Message Passing Interface (for supercomputing clusters) to potentially reduce wall time dramatically over single-node use. We will do our best to rapidly address any bugs found by users. Stay tuned for future updates.

Collidoscope, the Prell Group’s open-source program for calculating collisional cross sections via the Trajectory Method, is now available for public use upon request. Using pdb files or simple xyz-type files, users can compute low-field collisional cross sections for many organic and biological molecules ranging in size from 100 Da to >1 MDa in helium or nitrogen gas. Parallelization is automatically implemented (though it can be turned off as needed) to speed up computations, and a built-in option automatically places positive charges on protein ions in low-energy configurations before calculating collisional cross sections.

Sean Cleary gave a talk on the use of Fourier analysis in interpreting mass spectra of Nanodiscs at the Lake Arrowhead Ion Conference in Lake Arrowhead, CA, on Sat., Jan. 14, 2017.

An updated version of iFAMS (interactive Fourier Analysis for Mass Spectrometry) is now available upon request. This update features a noise analysis tool that allows users to calculate and display noise bands around charge-state-specific mass spectra.

The Prell Group welcomes Charlie Davis and Amber Rolland as new rotation students!

Prof. Prell recently attended the annual Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science Conference in Long Beach, CA. It was a fantastic meeting full of excellent posters and oral presentations, inspiring science, idea-sharing, and community-building!