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Presenter: Dr. Ian Webb, Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, IUPUI; Affiliate Member, Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Chemical modifications combined with mass spectrometry have been extensively used for identification and quantification of compounds of interest. Applications range from sample derivatization to the use of bioconjugation and chemical probes of protein structure. The Webb Lab uses solution and gaseous chemistries to facilitate the identification of compounds and their three-dimensional structures. We have used derivatization in the gas phase, a highly pure environment that accelerates reactions by orders of magnitude, with anion to cation charge inversion reactions coupled with ion mobility/mass spectrometry, to separate sugar isomers. Our group also uses chemical crosslinking, conducted in native-like solutions, to gain insight on the structures and conformational heterogeneity of dynamic protein systems. Finally, we use a combination of solution and gas-phase approaches with model folded and unfolded proteins to quantify the changes in structure upon ionization and analysis in the gas phase by mass spectrometry. We expect that these experiments will help us characterize to what extent so-called “native” mass spectrometry approaches, which in principle are high throughput and require minute amounts of sample, can be used to accurately solve structures of proteins and protein complexes.
Bio: Dr. Ian Webb has been working in the field of mass spectrometry since his undergraduate research in gas-phase ion energetics in the lab of J.C. Poutsma (College of William and Mary in Virginia) in 2004. He did his graduate work with Professor Scott McLuckey (Purdue University, West Lafayette), developing gas-phase ion/ion chemistries and fragmentation methods for mass spectrometric analysis of biomacromolecules, receiving his Ph.D. in 2012. He then joined the group of Dr. Richard Smith (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) for a postdoc and staff scientist position developing instrumentation for ion mobility spectrometry. Since starting his independent career at the Department of Chemistry at IUPUI, Dr. Webb’s research group has been developing mass spectrometry tools for biophysical and mixture analysis of biomolecules. His work has been honored through the receipt of the American Society of Mass Spectrometry Research Award in 2020, the IUPUI School of Science Research Award in 2021, and an NSF CAREER Award in 2022 for his work with isolated proteins in the gas phase.