DrMarina Edelson-Averbukh

I am a mass spectrometrist, specialising in the development of new physical methods for biomolecular sequence determination. I am the lead inventor of two-dimensional partial covariance mass spectrometry (2D-PC-MS), a fundamentally new type of mass spectrometry based on the physical principle of self-correcting partial covariance. 2D-PC-MS (featured in Physics Today – “Biomolecule mass spectrometry enters a new dimension”) provides a new dimension of structural information inaccessible to any other mass spectrometric method: fragment-fragment connectivity. The fragment-fragment correlations revealed by 2D-PC-MS enable the solution of peptide and protein sequence puzzles beyond the reach of any alternative technique. The 2D-PC-MS technology is protected by a US patent (US11600359B2), with an EU patent pending, with patent protection developed in collaboration with Imperial College Enterprise. Our recent development of 2D-PC-MS enables its seamless integration into standard MS-based proteomic sequencing workflows, paving the way for the routine use of 2D-PC-MS to significantly enhance the analytical power of modern proteomics.

I earned my PhD from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, for studies of new gas phase rearrangements of ionised polyfunctional organic molecules using mass spectrometry in the laboratory of Asher Mandelbaum. I carried out postdoctoral research as a Minerva Postdoctoral Fellow (Minerva Stiftung) at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ, Heidelberg), where I began developing new negative ion mode collision-induced dissociation approaches for the analysis of post-translationally modified peptides. After being awarded an independent PI academic fellowship (Eigene Stelle) by the DFG, I continued advancing the negative ion mode mass spectrometry for PTM analysis at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden. Following the award of a Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship, I founded a physical biomolecular mass spectrometry research programme in the Department of Physics, where 2D-PC-MS was developed. The programme is currently supported by an NSF–UKRI award in collaboration with UC San Diego to develop advanced computational proteomics tools based on 2D-PC-MS. In recent years, following completion of my MBA, I have expanded into entrepreneurial activities, including co-founding HaptoMass Ltd, an Imperial College spin-out focused on bringing 2D-PC-MS technology to market.