Some Historical Accounts of Bioterrorism

Mass Spectrometry. Edited by Ekman, Silberring, Westman-Brinkmahn, and Kraj Copyright 2009 John Wiley Sons, Inc. 

More recently, anthrax has been used as a biological weapon in the United States and a total of 22 cases were identified. Six fatalities occurred due to inhalation of the causal agent, Bacillus anthracis. Use of microorganisms for agroterrorism as well as infection of companion animals, and the potential development of genetically engineered agents have made the twenty-first century more vulnerable than past centuries. 

There are numerous other reports that illustrate the potential use of MALDI-TOF-MS for the rapid identification of various strains of B. anthracis. For instance, by using a new hybrid ion-trap MALDI-TOF instrument, in situ proteolytic digestion of 

In addition to MALDI-TOF and LC-MS/MS, SELDI-TOF-MS can also be used to determine expression profiling of various biological samples, such as serum or plasma for early detection of infection. Serum proteomic profiling assay, for instance, has been used to distinguish patients with acute SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) from patients with fever and influenza with 100% accuracy [16]. A major limitation of SELDI-TOF-MS, however, is that it cannot be used for direct amino acid sequence identification of the biomarker proteins, necessitating further sample fractionation and protein purification. 

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