John B. Fenn

John B. Fenn was an American chemist who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing electrospray ionization as a method for analyzing biological macromolecules.

Electrospray ionization: An ionization method that creates gas-phase ions by spraying a charged liquid through a high-voltage electric field. Fenn's development of this technique enabled mass spectrometric analysis of biological macromolecules.
Malcolm Dole: An American chemist whose group demonstrated electrospray production of gas-phase macromolecular ions in the 1960s. Dole's experiments established a precursor that Fenn later made practical for mass analysis.
Koichi Tanaka: A Japanese engineer who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a soft desorption ionization method for biological macromolecules. Tanaka shared Fenn's Nobel Prize for a distinct method addressing the same analytical challenge.
Proteomics: The large-scale study of proteins, including their identities, quantities, and interactions. Electrospray mass spectrometry became a major tool for identifying and characterizing proteins.
2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: The Nobel Chemistry award shared by John B. Fenn, Koichi Tanaka, and Kurt Wüthrich for work on biological macromolecules. The prize recognized Fenn's electrospray contribution alongside distinct advances by Tanaka and Wüthrich.
Mass spectrometry: An analytical technique that identifies ions by measuring their mass-to-charge ratios. Fenn adapted ionization to make this instrument useful for large biomolecules.
Electrospray: The formation of charged droplets from a liquid subjected to an electric field. Fenn's analytical ionization method grew from this broader physical phenomenon.
Kurt Wüthrich: A Swiss chemist who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing nuclear magnetic resonance methods for determining protein structures. Wüthrich received the same prize for a different contribution to studying biological macromolecules.
Tandem mass spectrometry: A technique that selects ions, fragments them, and analyzes the resulting product ions in successive stages. Electrospray often supplies intact precursor ions for sequence-oriented tandem analyses.
Electrospray ionization mass spectrometry: Mass spectrometry in which electrospray produces gas-phase ions from molecules in solution. This analytical platform carried Fenn's ionization development into broad biochemical use.

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