Courtesy of Thermo Electron For years, mass spectrometry has been de rigeur in chemistry labs. Recently, though, it has become a mainstay of proteomics research, too. Two years ago, investment bank UBS Warburg identified proteomics as the fastest- growing application of mass spectrometry, a prediction borne out at this year's American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) annual meeting, where more than 1,100 of 2,227 presentations discussed some aspect of proteomics. It took a confluence of t

Courtesy of Tecan Group Knowledge of the tissues and cells that express particular genes is key to understanding gene function. In situ hybridization (ISH), a popular method for deciphering gene expression, is a slow, labor-intensive, error-prone operation that limits parallel investigation of multiple genes and tissues to what may be carried out quickly by hand. These attributes essentially preclude slide-staining efforts from the high-throughput analyses that are so critical to functional ge