The report, entitled: "Mass Spectrometry: Opportunities in the Life Science Market," also revealed that Agilent Technologies and Thermo Finnigan followed closely behind as leading brands, which customers were significantly more satisfied with than their most recent mass spectrometer acquisition than purchasers of other brands
"Current brand usage and/or most recent MS purchase are strong predictors of future brand purchase, but are not absolute indicators. Other factors, such as research objective, MS applications and motivation for purchase will all enter into the decision to obtain one system as compared to another," said Dr Robin Rothrock, director of market research at BioInformatics.
One application that mass spectrometry is becoming associated with is quantitative proteomics, particularly in protein biomarker discovery and validation/screening. The trend has seen suppliers developing products from labelling chemistries to sophisticated software to meet the needs of this emerging market, which is predicted, to grow between current and future mass spectrometer users.
"The difficulties associated with experimental design, interpretation of results, and reagent/instrumentation cost remain significant barriers to widespread adoption. New approaches to labelling as well as novel software for data analysis and interpretation have been developed by suppliers to address these issues," said Rothrock.
"However, given the nascent state of the market and the relatively small number of actual practitioners, methods for quantitative proteomics are still in flux," he added.
The report also has implications for the suppliers of kits and reagents used in high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), gel electrophoresis and other sample preparation techniques.
While HPLC is the sample preparation protocol used most frequently by those surveyed, a number of key MS applications such as protein digest analysis and multi-protein complex characterisations rely on more manual and labour intensive preps.
Scientists conducting these analyses predominately utilise protein digestion and 1-D/2-D gels plus protein digestion, respectively, to prepare their samples, presenting suppliers with an opportunity to target their protein separation products to these researchers.
The report, compiled by data analyst firm BioInformatics, is available now to purchase.