A video tour of Vanderbilt's Mass Spectrometry Resource Center

The Mass Spectrometry Research Center at Vanderbilt is a National Research Resource for Imaging Mass Spectrometry. A leader in its field, MSRC serves as a resource for universities, research institutes, and private industry. It regularly hosts a number of training opportunities for fellow scientists and clinicians, including a four-day annual course that will be held in late April.

Recently, Dr. Richard Caprioli, director of the center, gave us a tour. He walked us through the 5,500 square foot facility that houses dozens of mass spectrometers, auto-loaders, microfluidic pumps (which Caprioli prototyped), a center-specific informatics core, and other technologies with innovative applications. He even showed us the exact window that will be removed to bring in a 15-tesla mass spectrometer later this year. It's too big to bring up the elevator. But it's not just big; it's powerful. To put it in perspective, one tesla is roughly 20,000 times the strength of the magnetic field of the earth.