Label Free versus TMT Based Mass Spectrometry

• Tandem Mass Tags (TMT) are small amine reactive tags that fragment in MS/MS to release unique reporter ions.
• Various versions including TMT-11 plex and more recently TMTpro-18 and 35- plex with different labeling chemistries.
• Using TMT in Mass Spectrometry experiments allows more samples to be run in same amount of Mass Spectrometer analysis time, or deeper analysis by off-line fractionation prior to Mass Spectrometric analysis.
• TMT based experiments treble the number of statistically significant regulated peptides detected compared to label-free methods.
• TMT based proteomics allow for the detection of 30% changes of a  particular protein between samples in the multiplex compared to 3 to 4 fold changes with corresponding label free mass spectrometry methods.
• TMT in combination with the TMTcalibrator application to increase the overall sensitivity of the Mass Spectrometer is key to allow the development of Single Cell Proteomics (SCP) where we can detect >1,000 proteins from a single cell.  More in this service offering will be available soon.   Please register your interest here
 
How TMT works in a Mass Spectrometry experiment please see this link
 
For peer reviewed papers where TMT based Mass Spectrometry has been published in a variety of applications and disease areas, please see this link