Varun Gadkari

2026 Analytical Division Award Winners The ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 Division Awards. ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry Award in Electrochemistry

Excited to announce that I am the recipient of the 2026 ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry Arthur F. Findeis Award! Congrats to the other winners and honored to be in the great company of previous winners of this award!

acsanalytical.org/2026/03/05/2...

That's right. Worse than Pointless
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/o...

Modification of a QE-UHMR for soft-landing while maintaining full day-to-day function of the instrument for routine native MS work. Pretty cool.

Let me just make a few little adjustments to that title…

“How a scientist with a PhD in Geology and 25 years of experience is helping lead California’s earthquake work”

Way to devalue my experience.

Liam is home now and we are grateful to @joaquincastrotx.bsky.social for traveling to Minneapolis with him and his dad.

Welcome home Liam ❤️❤️

Hundreds of people spelled out the distress signal "SOS" on Bde Maka Ska in Minneapolis on Friday, Jan. 30.

📷️ Provided by Jeff Schad

Quantitative Mapping of NHS Ester–Protein Reactivity Using Native Top-Down Mass Spectrometry Covalent ligands are widely used to label, probe, and modulate proteins, but peptide-centric readouts obscure how modifications colocalize on intact proteoforms. This can limit insight into ligand mechanism, modification stoichiometry, and the architecture of multisite protein conjugates. We present a general native top-down mass spectrometry workflow that quantifies electrophile reactivity directly on intact proteins. Using NHS esters as a model electrophile class, we apply a deconvolution framework to infer differential reactivity at primary amines across promiscuous, multisite modification patterns. The approach preserves full modification connectivity, avoids sample-preparation artifacts associated with denaturation and digestion, and should extend to electrophiles with unknown reactivity. Overall, this framework provides a general platform for designing covalent therapeutics, bioconjugates, and activity-based probes with proteoform-level resolution.

Quantitative Mapping of NHS Ester–Protein Reactivity Using Native Top-Down Mass Spectrometry #JASMS pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

The federal government is murdering our neighbors in broad daylight and carrying out a mission of terror against the Twin Cities. Schools and businesses are closed and people are staying home because they’re afraid of ICE. This is America in 2026: at war against its own people.

Live: Man shot by federal agents in south Minneapolis this morning, witnesses say A video appears to shows federal agents wrestling a man to the ground then shooting him.

Man shot by federal agents has died, police chief says
www.startribune.com/ice-raids-mi...

Trigger warning. I cannot believe this is happening minutes from where we live and work. Several ICE agents struggled with 1 man this morning and then shot him at point blank range when he was already down. Several shots fired after he was already down. Tribune has confirmed that the victim is dead.

Man shot by federal agent in south Minneapolis www.startribune.com/ice-raids-mi...

ACS Chemistry for Life Logo P2F Postdoc to Faculty Workshop Washington, DC July 17-19, 2026

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Join the ACS Postdoc to Faculty Workshop and learn from current faculty members about the skills & experiences you need to succeed!
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What's larger, a protein or its templating mRNA ?

> The mRNA is much larger.

⬛ 𝐀 𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐞 -- 𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 & 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐬 -- 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐮𝐥 𝐞𝐧𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐟 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡.

The figure shows myoglobin protein drawn to scale next to its mRNA template. The coding sequence of an mRNA ...

I’m excited to share our new ChemRxiv preprint describing native charge detection mass spectrometry for intact analysis of large, heterogeneous RNAs. Led by Raihana Afroz, in collaboration with @thermofishersci.bsky.social lnkd.in/gc29gYy7
#DirectMassTechnology #Orbitrap #CDMS #RNA

Today on @chemrxiv.org, we disclose a C-to-N replacement that actually works complex natural products - a pipe-dream when we started. The secret is to lean in to the triplet nitrene.

Congrats Dong Il, and thanks to the whole team, including collaborators from Sanofi!

chemrxiv.org/engage/chemr...

High performance interface for boosting ion transmission in native mass spectrometry and beyond. Electrospray ionization (ESI)-based native mass spectrometry (MS) has been extensively used to study non-covalent protein complexes and their structural aspects in the gas phase. As such it has a stable place in the portfolio of modern structural biology and biopharmaceutical analysis techniques. It is also promising as an approach to deliver pro-teins and their assemblies into the gas phase for single particle experiments at advanced light sources such as free electron lasers and synchrotrons. Here we report on a novel radiofrequency ion transfer interface enabling gas flow laminarization at low pressure for efficient capture, focusing, thermalization, trapping and gating of ions into a mass analyser, boosting up to 19-fold the observable signal intensities especially for notoriously challenging multi-megadalton assemblies such as in-tact viral capsids. The new ion transfer interface offers unique opportunities for interdisciplinary approaches intersecting native MS-guided structural biology, molecular and cluster physics as well as (bio)analytical applications. Additionally, when combined with sensitive detection of individual particles, this technology could eventually also open new avenues in clinical diagnostics, enabling for example the analysis of viruses at very low concentrations directly from dilute patient-derived samples as well as viral therapeutic vectors along the biopharmaceutical production chain, thereby helping to un-lock the full potential of native MS.

(ChemRxiv) High performance interface for boosting ion transmission in native mass spectrometry and beyond.: Electrospray ionization (ESI)-based native mass spectrometry (MS) has been extensively used to study non-covalent protein complexes and their structural aspects… (RSS) #chemrxiv #MassSpecRSS

Impact of Supercharging on Top-Down Characterization of Monoclonal Antibodies by Collision Induced Dissociation Publication date: Available online 8 January 2026 Source: International Journal of Mass Spectrometry Author(s): Lasini Amunugama, Jared B. Shaw

(IJMS) Impact of Supercharging on Top-Down Characterization of Monoclonal Antibodies by Collision Induced Dissociation: Publication date: Available online 8 January 2026

Source: International Journal of Mass Spectrometry

Author(s): Lasini Amunugama, Jared B. Shaw #ijms #MassSpecRSS

Do I know anyone who went undergraduate at University of New Mexico? If that's you, please DM me.

Please RT | thank you!

Wishing everyone a wonderful Halloween from Hogwarts (aka, the Baker Lab)!!

New research article from the Gadkari Group is live on ChemRxiv. In this collaboration with Prof. Sarah Krueger (Mount St. Mary's Univ.), we characterized the interactions between sequence-specific transcription inhibitors and DNA expansions found in neurological disorders.
doi.org/10.26434/che...

We are saddened to share news of Alan Marshall’s passing. He was ASMS President (2004–2006), co-inventor of FT-ICR MS, 1999 Distinguished Contribution Awardee, and an ASMS Fellow (2025). Our thoughts are with his family, friends, colleagues, and mentees.

loom.ly/q0KZfqM

The Gadkari Group had a great week at #ASMS2025, presenting new work, making new connections, and seeing old friends! Great work by Rowan and Bella! We finished the week with our dept. symposium where Raihana and Pete delivered their milestone talks. I’m so proud of all the hard work on display!

Congrats to Bella for winning one of the #ASMS2025 Undergraduate Poster Competition awards!! She is representing the Gadkari Research Group and UMN Chemistry (@umnchemistry.bsky.social) well! Note that Bella also won an ASMS @asms.org undergraduate travel award this year!

Check out two more great posters from the Gadkari Research Group today at #ASMS2025! Arabella Garcia will present her work using CIU to study glycosylation in biotherapeutics at WP570. Rowan Matney will demosntrate the utility of cyclicIM to perform comformer selective CIU (WP465). Stop by!

Are you at #ASMS2025? Interested in intact and native measurements of large #RNA? Swing by my poster TP346 to see what we’ve been doing in the Gadkari Research Group using Orbitrap-based charge detection mass spectrometry!

Is that you Joe?

Harvard sues Trump administration to stop the freeze of more than $2 billion in grants Harvard University has announced that it's suing the Trump administration to halt a freeze on more than $2.2 billion in grants after the institution said it would defy the Trump administration’s demands to limit activism on campus.

BREAKING: Harvard sues the Trump administration to stop the freeze of more than $2 billion in grants.

We have emerged, you guys!!! We show sequential oxidation of lysine by a non-heme iron enzyme. The paper was also highlighted in the HOT article collection of Chem Comm.

In further exciting news, the 1st undergrad researcher in our group, Bella Garcia, received an Undergraduate Student Award from @asms.org. Check out her cool work using IM-MS and CIU to study stressed antibodies at #ASMS2025 in the Undergrad Poster session (Sun) and Protein Therapeutics (Wed).