Jean C. Kridl

Crop development to improve yield or disease resistance has been explored for centuries and the technologies to measure these improvements have subsequently become complex. The use of transgenes in crop plants is a more technically advanced approach than traditional breeding and the success of this approach is best assessed using modern techniques that accurately quantify the desired traits. Here, we applied targeted liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS) using synthetic stable isotope–labeled peptides to identify and quantify the relative levels of transgenic to native protein.

Liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS) successfully differentiated transgenic from native protein in a case where the proteins were highly homologous and could not be differentiated by traditional methods. This methodology may be useful for other studies of transgenic crops.