Happy holidays from the Ruotolo lab! Had a wonderful time at our lab holiday dinner this past Monday!

More pictures! Including Dr. Brandon Ruotolo :)

Our lab had a great time at the Anachem Symposium this past week! Congratulations to our very own Saachi Kheterpal for winning best graduate poster! 🥳🥳

Check out our newest article in Analytical Chemistry about high-throughput mAb peptide mapping with HPLC and cIM-MS!

Link: pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Energy-Dependent Changes in Ion Mobility Peak Width Reveal Stability Shifts in Ribonucleic Acid Stem Loops Ribonucleic acids (RNAs) are becoming increasingly important to our understanding of cellular biology and our search for new or improved biotherapeutics. However, the dynamic and polydisperse nature of RNAs creates challenges for their structural characterization. Here, we focus on RNA stem-loops (i.e., hairpins), as these are ubiquitous elements of RNA secondary structures. We leverage native ion mobility-mass spectrometry (IM-MS) and collision-induced unfolding (CIU) to study stem loops isolated from mitochondrial tRNA (tRNA) across a wide range of disease-relevant mutants. While we find that native IM-MS analyses proved capable of tracking stem-loop structure changes upon cofactor-binding and mutation, it remains challenging to evaluate the stabilities of small RNAs using standard RNA CIU workflows. Thus, we explore the ability of energy-dependent changes by IM peak full-width half-maximum (fwhm) values to characterize the stabilities of RNA stem-loops. We find that RNA stem-loop IM fwhm values typically decrease significantly upon activation, with lesser differences detected in Mg2+-bound RNA samples in a manner consistent with the stabilization expected under such conditions. We conclude by discussing the potential future applications of IM fwhm analyses in the context of RNA CIU assay development.

Energy-Dependent Changes in Ion Mobility Peak Width Reveal Stability Shifts in Ribonucleic Acid Stem Loops | Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Check out this article using cyclic ion mobility to isolate and identify cardiolipin subspecies in biological samples!

Link: doi.org/10.3389/fphy...

Check out our newest publication on a quantitative comparison between solution and gas-phase RNA unfolding!

DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.5c01148
Link: pubs.acs.org/articlesonre...

Evaluation of Membrane Mimetics for the Native Ion Mobility─Mass Spectrometry Analysis of Membrane Proteins Membrane protein (MP) structures and functions are intricately linked to their surrounding membrane environments and their respective lipid compositions in addition to influences exerted by unique mem...

pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Congratulations to our newest grad, Dr. Anna Anders! Wish you the best of luck and you will be missed!!🥳🥳🥳🎉🎉🎉

Great time at #LakeLouise2024 @lakelouisemsms.bsky.social, thanks very much for the 2024 Ken Standing Award (including surprise Inukshuk statue) and the in-room Christmas tree.

Molecular insights into the interaction between a disordered protein and a folded RNA | PNAS Intrinsically disordered protein regions (IDRs) are well established as contributors to intermolecular interactions and the formation of biomolecul...

Check out the newly published PNAS article regarding the biophysical characterization of a disordered protein, a folded RNA, and their complex! ✨✨
Link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2409139121