MALDI: more than peptide mass fingerprints.

Over the past decade, matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) has developed from a phenomenon that was interesting only to physicists and mass spectrometrists, and has evolved into a widespread applied ionization technique in chemistry, biology and biomedicine. The introduction of MALDI offers all the advantages of mass spectrometry (MS) for the analysis of large biomolecules. Proteins, carbohydrates and oligonucleotides have been analyzed with MS-inherent accuracy, sensitivity, resolution and speed. In addition to electrospray ionization-MS, MALDI-MS has a great impact on the challenges of the post-genome area. The recent status of MALDI application in proteomics, biomolecular interaction analysis-MS and carbohydrate analysis, in addition to single nucleotide polymorphism genotyping is reviewed.