Powerful computers

For my most recent experiment I have been doing some intense computing. In the experiment I used mass spectrometry to look at all of the proteins inside four different kinds of cells. Mass Spec is a very powerful tool to look at many different kinds of samples. Essentially you take a sample and then zap it with lasers repeatedly until it surrenders all of its information. The only biology technique that lets you shoot more lasers at a sample is crystalography and as cool as lasers are, no number of them are worth doing crystalography for. The down side to Mass spec is that the data comes out in huge files because they catalog every protein in the cell and how much of each one there is. No one just wants to know what is in a cell any more; that has all been looked at very well by other scientists. What people want to know is how cells are different under certain conditions like disease, aging, or exercise. So to figure that out you have to compare more than one giant file. My poor little computer only has a tiny bit of memory. The people who work in the mass spec core were nice enough to let me come use their computers which are much more powerful than mine. If you look closely you may see there was some creative remodeling to make sure that my computer had all the hookups it needed. Massive data sets are the way of the future but they are kind of less fun than microscopes (which for the record also use lasers).