Once upon a time, mass spectrometers were open-platform devices that could be tweaked as new applications arose. Today’s mass specs, though, are tightly engineered black boxes: sample in, data out.
“As the level of sophistication of software and components has improved, it’s almost impossible to crack open one of these instruments and make a change, because you don’t have the schematics for all the electronics, nor access to all the control codes,” says Joshua Coon, assistant professor of chemistry and biomolecular chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As a result, the pool of researchers capable of building mass spec components from scratch has dwindled, says Richard Smith, who has been building mass spec hardware at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for nearly 30 years.
For most mass spectrometrists, turnkey systems do all they could want and more. Lack of customizability is a small price to pay for the speed, ...
