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Advancing biological discovery through proteomics: from mass spectrometry to medicine

Published on May 28, 2026   24 min

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Interviewer: Today, I'm interviewing Prof. John Yates, the Ernest W. Hahn Professor in the Departments of Molecular Medicine and Neurobiology at the Scripps Research Institute. A link to his very impressive biography, achievements, and awards accompanies this interview. The subject of the interview is the art and science of advancing biological discovery through proteomics. Prof. Yates, thank you for sparing the time. May I start by asking, 1. What can we do now that we could not do five years or 10 years ago? 2. How and where should we apply this new capacity? Prof. Yates. Prof. Yates: Thank you for inviting me to be a part of this interview. I think a good place to start with this is to actually discuss where the art of protein sequencing started. If you go back to 1980, there was a big paradigm shift in the invention of gas-phase liquid Edman sequencing, and that increased detection limits by a factor of about 100, and that was a huge increase that enabled the sequencing of proteins that people couldn't analyze before. That, together with the US boom in the 1980s. But the problem with Edman sequencing was it was really one protein at a time. Then by the end of the 1980s, electrospray ionization came along and electrospray ionization is a very important new technology that resulted in the 2002 Nobel Prize for John Fenn.

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Advancing biological discovery through proteomics: from mass spectrometry to medicine

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