Matthias Mann

Matthias Mann (born 1959) is a scientist in the area of mass spectrometry and proteomics. Born 1959 in Germany he studied mathematics and physics at the University of Goettingen. He received his Ph.D. in 1988 at Yale University were he worked in the group of the later Nobel laureate John B. Fenn. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense he became group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. Later he went back to Odense as a Professor for Bioinformatics. Since 2005 he is a director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich. In addition, he will also become a principal investigator at the newly founded "Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research" in Copenhagen.

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His work has impact in various fields of mass spectrometry-based proteomics:

• The peptide sequence tag approach developed at the EMBL was one of the first methods for the identification of peptides based on mass spectra and genome data.
• Nano-electrospray (an electrospray technique with very low flow rates) was the first method that allowed femtomole sequencing of proteins from polyacrylamide gels.
• A recently developed metabolic labeling technique called SILAC (stable isotope labeling with amino acids in cell culture) is widely used in quantitative proteomics.